The first step of assessing your situation is an extremely important step that is often overlooked. Organizations often look at the challenges they face, but they don't necessarily identify opportunities for buy-in. When I worked for AmeriCorps, I was part of the team that worked with state commissions to help their nonprofit programs run smoothly. This position also required me to participate in the annual grant review process. Basically, we would read all the applications and choose the "best of the best" based on things like the needs of the state, whether they were focused on a presidential initiative, how they have done in the past, and what they plan to do. TO DO. This process only eliminates a few and we then examine their potential for success. This is always about recruitment and retention. If you fail to recruit and retain your program, it will have little or no success. Those who were unsuccessful during grant review were encouraged to work with their programs at the beginning of the year to identify their gaps and later this evaluation process became mandatory. An important point made by Levin is that an organization needs a historical perspective, meaning that it is helpful to be aware of and learn from its successes and failures (364). The assessments each commission completes on its programs will require steps to resolve the problem and develop a plan. Whether you are aware of the problem or not, if you don't have an action plan, you will have no guidance to make changes. There should be somewhat specific achievable goals. As Levin mentioned, the goal of membership should be to recruit and retain (365) but it would be helpful to be specific about the criteria...... middle of paper ...... in some cases much more needs to be done while in others this is not the case. People are really drawn to USAID and when events like the Haiti disaster happen, even more people are interested in helping. You can see that for an agency like this, retention is not a priority. Still, you can imagine that retention could be a problem for posts in Afghanistan. Knowing that it is a difficult place to live and that the rate of burnout is high, USAID does not let its agents work for more than a year. So they created a rule so that there would be no retention problem. My experience is not directly related to membership although AmeriCorps recruits members, but my position was working with commissions that worked with programs and recruitment and retention occurred at the program level. However, you can see how many of my points can relate to the recruitment and retention of association members..