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by Michael Pastore
Ebook in PDF (download)
56 pages. 8.5" x 11", printable
ISBN: 978-0-927379-56-4; ZP # 199
Price: $ 24.95
Updated and Expanded in 2007 !
Written especially for super-busy Camp Directors and Youth Program Directors, Brisk Management puts essential information at your fingertips to save tons of your valuable time. Staff training is the key to overall success; and Brisk Management gives you the tools to train your staff with confidence and expertise.
Author Michael Pastore explains how this ebook came about ...
When I began working as the year-round Director of a large youth program, I discovered three urgent problems. Problem the first: to develop the program’s short-term and long-term goals. Problem the second: to figure out how to bring these on-paper goals into day-to-day real life. And problem the third: how to find time, precious time, to focus on what really makes a difference in the life of every staff member and child under my care.
Time shortage was the biggest problem. Every Director wears more hats than Bartholomew Cubbins. With all the time, energy, and effort needed to manage basic operations — finances and budgeting, health care, food services, maintenance, plumbing problems, software databases, state inspections and licenses, complying with ever-changing certification requirements, and board meetings unending — how could time be found to focus on the children and the staff?
Happily, I did find solutions to these perennial problems. In the first four years, my program’s operating budget doubled, and the child-population of our organization grew more than 60%, to more than 1,100 kids.
The numbers impressed the easily impressionable, but the essential things were absent from the accounting books and invisible on the final reports. Our 300 acres became a place where each child received a superabundance of respect and loving care. Wholesome fun blossomed: fun without drugs, without shopping malls, and without mindless tv and violent video games. In this kind of warm and all-accepting emotional environment, children were free to grow in their own ways, and to flourish into unique individuals and healthy human beings. Our so-called ‘gifted’ children developed and deepened their intellectual and artistic gifts. Our ‘normal’ children found new interests, and discovered their hidden creative powers. Our ‘problem’ kids — woe to everyone who uses that self-defeating term! — opened up and healed. These formerly neglected kids now had no time or interest in getting into trouble or bullying the other children. They were now too busy making friends and having fun.
What, then, was my secret weapon for transforming a mailing list and a chunk of land into a paradise for children? ... It was the idea — and the actions around that idea — that staff training makes all the difference: staff members need to be thoroughly trained to manage the modern child.
Brisk Management — first delivered as a lecture-presentation (with the title: Camping Is Caring) to a national conference of the American Camping Association — is a concise summary of everything I taught, and tried to teach, to my young and enthusiastic staff.
This electronic publication of Brisk Management contains more than 20 guide-sheets — and assorted selections from my paperback books — that help summer camp Directors, teachers, group leaders, and Youth Program Directors to develop and deliver meaningful and interesting staff training sessions. This booklet may be read on-screen, or printed out via your home or office printer. It may be used by itself alone, but is even more effective when combined with my other books about working with children to nurture their kindness and creativity.
Brisk Management: How To Train Your Staff To Care For Your Kids is not for bringing the vision of Michael Pastore into your program; not the ideas of A.S. Neill, or Neil Postman, or Spock (Doctor or Mister) — Brisk Management is a tool for clarifying your own goals and ideas. It will help you to grasp, to clarify, and to realize your own personal vision — and then to carry that vision that from your mind and heart into the young and happy worlds of your own staff and your own kids.
Brisk Management is a PDF ebook: download the ebook, then read on-screen, or print the 8.5" x 11" pages using your computer's printer at your office or home.
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