by Bill Magargal & Eileen Rowley

Now that we are an all-volunteer organization, did you ever wonder who issues your LOI eStamp, manages your renewals, changes your travel status, or answers questions raised by members? Well, meet the Member Help team. This team has the distinction of being the largest, longest running, and most active team since we migrated to the new US website in 2021. This is due largely to the efforts of David Hills, who set up procedures for doing these tasks and performed them alone for the first few months on the new system. David is also a slick recruiter who got this article's coauthor, Bill Magargal, to join him in November of 2021. He also established a system for training new volunteers by starting them out on simpler tasks, then mentoring them to other functions as their time, talent, and interests allowed.

Today, the Member Help team consists of twelve people. This distributes the workload and allows time for team members to travel and do other things.  Although the website allows team members to perform tasks more efficiently than previous Servas systems, the fact that we must coordinate information between two websites increases the workload. The US website keeps track of member contact and membership information. The International website stores all travel-related data, making it searchable by all members world-wide, thus eliminating the need for paper host lists... Yay!

Here are the current Member Help team members (listed alphabetically by first name).