After accounting for the AmeriCorps swearing in ceremony and the welcome lunch, I only had four hours with the Portland Fruit Tree Project’s (PFTP) prior VISTA member—four hours of tutorials, file systems and Q&A to make me into the finest second Outreach & Volunteer Coordinator VISTA that the PFTP ever had. That day, I recorded everything I could to ensure that this knowledge wasn’t lost. I repeated this the next day and the following, every day for the rest of the month. Onboarding documents from the prior VISTA member were merged with onboarding documents from the PFTP’s Executive Director and lengthy introductory emails from the Harvest VISTA program. I consolidated links from Google Drive and Canva; saved login information; and added to my daily notes. Soon, my single, monstrous Google Doc of knowledge began to take shape. While messy at first, each day made it clearer: the organization, my role, and my responsibilities. Titles and subtitles gave the document much needed structure. Blocks of text were reduced to high-level bullet points. Previous unknowns became the basis of questions to ask my supervisor. 

It’s not that I had extra time to record everything. In fact, being so new in my role meant that basic tasks were difficult because I wasn’t sure how to do them, and after doing them I wasn’t sure if I did them correctly. “Was the volunteer opportunity accurately described? How do I clone an existing event in the volunteer management system? Why did my coworker CC me on that email?” On the computer, I screenshotted everything that I learned by doing and added the image to the document. When tabling at outreach events, I took notes on my phone during a quiet moment, recording questions community members asked that I didn’t know the answers to and noting additional things to pack for a smoother experience next time. In my first month at the Portland Fruit Tree Project, I have been building the ship as I sail it. When the finest third Outreach & Volunteer Coordinator VISTA arrives, I can use the four-hour overlap to walk them through a comprehensive guidebook that explains everything they need to know.