The solid play of the Cleveland Browns was a highlight of my January, which was otherwise a cold and challenging month for many of us in this pandemic. For the first time since the late 1980s, the team I root for played important games in December and January, and left me and other fans feeling a long-lost sense of optimism for the future.
This distraction was a welcome respite in January, which has become a time of year when I hear from many teens and families in distress. This year felt more intense than ever. I’ve had several conversations with people struggling with depression, isolation, and school refusal. I relish being able to offer them a bit of optimism and hope in explaining how they can take control of at least the schooling part of their lives. This year, however, I couldn’t offer them the welcoming gathering space of our building, and I felt this absence. I spent a bit of extra time focusing myself on what is going well for North Star. For starters, I celebrated that we do have a friendly online-community and program, which is making a significant improvement in people’s lives. I’d like to share two unexpectedly positive (no pun intended) Covid-19-related outcomes of this year for North Star. One is our Distance Member program, and the other, surprisingly, is our finances.
The first pandemic-related highlight of this year for me is our Distance Program. Last summer, our Core Staff decided that we would be primarily an online program this year, and therefore, perhaps we could welcome people who don’t live near us. My experience with Distance- Consulting over the past several years has been mediocre, so I wasn’t initially enthused. (I had found that teens far away welcomed an initial conversation and brainstorming session about living without school but then were not interested in maintaining a long-term weekly check-in relationship.) However, we had several local, returning families who were telling us they were suspending their North Star memberships until we are open in-person again. So, with the initiative and optimism of my colleagues, we launched a Distance Membership program. I am glad I have colleagues!
North Star currently has thirteen Distance Members, likely to become fifteen in the coming week. This group includes three teens in California, three near Boston, MA, one in Texas, one in Florida, one in Portugal (a former North Star family that has moved), and four from the New Haven, CT area where our allied center, Beacon, is closing. The likely next two Distance Members are from Atlanta, GA and Long Island, NY. In the past month, I’ve spoken with families in Asheville, NC, northern CA, and Hartford, CT. I’ve had an inquiry about whether we would welcome a teen from the Caribbean, but I haven’t heard back.
These Distance Members have been strong participants in North Star this year. They look forward to our Community Meeting, and provide plenty of energy and spark to these online group gatherings. Most of them have identified two to six classes they attend weekly, and in my groups they are solid contributors. Some of them have requested one-on-one tutorials, which they utilize with reliability and appreciation. Most of all, each of them has developed an advisory relationship with one of our Core Staff members, and at our staff meetings we discuss their lives and use of North Star in the same terms as we do local members. They are fully integrated members of our community, and we actually lose track of whether teens are local or distance members.
Across the Liberated Learners network, our colleagues at other centers are having similar positive experiences with Distance Memberships. There are perhaps another half-dozen to dozen teens who are Distance Members of Alcove (Los Angeles, CA), Deep Root (Canton, NY), Princeton Learning Cooperative (Princeton, NJ) and other centers. As a group, we are now discussing how we can maintain a Distance Program next year, when we anticipate having our programs operating in-person again(!). While each of us could offer advisories and tutorials to Distance Members, it is unlikely any one center will provide enough online classes to make a program worthwhile. However, if each center hosts two classes per week on Zoom, then we’d have 15-20 groups to offer, including perhaps a social community time for these teens as well. We are not yet certain how we will structure it, but we do know we are interested in maintaining our connections with our new Distance Members.
So, that is a happy surprise that would not have happened if we were not having a pandemic.
Meanwhile, what might have been an extremely difficult year financially for North Star has become one of our calmest. First, revenue from these Distance Members has helped replace the loss of membership fee income from local members who are not interested in an online program. Second, our annual donors have maintained their generosity to North Star this year, which has made an enormous difference. Third, the Federal PPP-forgivable loan program has covered our losses from canceling our major fundraiser, Circus Smirkus, two years in a row. (Thank you, Greenfield Savings Bank for your expert and necessary help!) Fourth, we accepted a long-term low-interest Federal EIDL loan. So, rather than being a small non-profit in crisis, we are maintaining our payroll and focusing on our member families and community. We even developed the new spectacular fundraising event, Get Down With Your Hometown, with friends at The Institute for Musical Arts and The Shea Theater. In its first year, this two-day music festival generated enormous joy, fun, and goodwill in our community this past month. While North Star is not permanently stable financially, we are in much better shape than we might have anticipated. Thank you to everyone who has had a role in this process.
We now move on to February. The Browns are not in the Super Bowl, but I at least get to cherish the memories of the best season since before I became a teacher! (That is an unusually long time in the world of professional sports, in case this is unclear.) Some of will find ways to enjoy the cold and snow, while others will countdown the days to Spring. We get a few more minutes of sunlight every day. With any luck, this new month will bring a vaccination plan we can all understand, and perhaps we will be able to start imagining what comes next.