Frequently Asked Questions What kind of activities have the coordinators done to date? With the help of coordinators, a list of activities is attached. No one coordinator did all of these activities Nor did any coordinator limit him or herself to only one of the categories. Each coordinator performs the myriad tasks needed at individual sites. The JOI program recognizes that each site is different. As you can see from a glance, there is a great deal of breadth in the type of activities that are possible. Of course, coordinators are not limited to the activities on this list. The supervisor and coordinator might produce another fifteen activities that have not even been thought of yet! Click here for the list of activities. Additional information regarding activities can be found on the JOI wikisite. Do you have any suggestions about how to secure housing? Please uunderstand that The Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership has been very generous in their support of this program and feels that the site should provide some commitment beyond office space and supervising. Since JOI is not administered out of your community, it seems natural to request the hosting site to be responsible for housing. The $750 monthly stipend that the coordinator receives does not go very far if he or she needs to pay for housing. If you or your board cannot provide university or apartment housing because of the financial burden to your organization, that is completely understandable. This is why host families are a possible option. Although the coordinator will be with the site for two years, the host family does not need to commit to two years. The strategy that seems to work for others is to ask a family to commit to one semester or through the end of December. Letting the host family know that you will revisit this issue with them just before Thanksgiving to ask them if they are able to continue hosting or if the coordinator will need to move to another host family seems to reassure the families. In past programs, when this strategy was used, most host families decided to continue hosting for the year. This strategy seemed to make it easier to approach potential host families and to gain a commitment, especially if the families felt that they had an 'out' at the end of the semester. Some suggestions on ways to approach the search might be to ask university faculty and staff, K-12 teachers, churches, K-12 Japanese language students' families, friends of board members, martial arts schools, parents of your children's friends/soccer teams/ballet schools or other after school activities in which your own children might be involved, doctors, lawyers, accountants (one previous program participant asked a few major law and accounting firms to post a flyer about the program and hosting request in their break rooms), library bulletin boards. Some Junior Leagues or Garden Clubs may be approached to take this on as a project. The consulate may be able to provide a list of JET alumni in your area and have this as one of their projects. The Chamber of Commerce could be asked to mention the search in one of their newsletters. In other words, enlist community members to help. All of the groups mentioned have the potential of benefiting from having a coordinator in their community. The coordinator will be going into schools, perhaps assisting with translating for the economic development office, giving talks to the Garden Club, business groups, etc. You do not have to find the host family all by yourself!