October 18, 2012
OMBIL SCA/volunteer hours guidance
It's everyone's favorite time of year again... time to enter your OMBIL data! Hopefully by now
all of you have had a chance to participate in the webinars provided by Melissa Rinehart and
Dena Williams. If not, or if you need a refresher please check out their webinars posted on:
http://corpslakes.usace.army.mil/partners/pdfs/11OMBIL-
Partnerships.pdf Or on the OMBIL website in the User Manuals and Reference Materials
pages for Rec or ES business lines.
I'm very happy to see that we already have almost
$3 million worth of partnership data entered in the system, but still many more to be
accounted for.
One of the most frequently asked questions that I get each year relates
to reporting of volunteer hours. Last year we developed a flow chart to help you through
the decision process (see attached). We've added some additional guidance this year
pertaining to recording SCA intern hours. There has been debate in the past over whether
SCA interns should be counted as volunteers or not, because we pay money to the SCA to
acquire the services of the interns. What the Corps pays is technically 'overhead costs to
SCA' for their operation of the program, not an actual salary to the intern. Based on this,
we've made the decision to record SCA service this way:
1. In the Annual Project
Data Update recreation or ES sections, include hours served by SCA interns in your total
volunteer hours. DO NOT include expenses paid to the SCA in the incidental expense
column.
2. In the Partnership Update, select either Recreation or ES business line
depending on whether the work being conducted by the intern falls more into one category
over the other. Select partnership type "Cooperative Agreement". Enter the hours served by
the SCA intern(s). Enter the value provided by the SCA organization. This is their share of
the agreement which includes their administrative costs, insurance benefits provided,
stipend, etc. You may need to contact SCA to determine their match in the partnership.
Enter the Corps costs associated with the intern(s) in the Contract Funds column. This is the
amount that the Corps sent by MIPR to SCA.
3. For those lakes which received SCA
water safety interns through the national program, please count their hours served at your
project.
4. I will work with Kathy and Scott to capture hours served by the VERS SCA
interns at the national level, so you do not need to include those in your project annual
update.
Thanks,
Heather Burk
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