Volunteer retention is the kind of stat only a volunteer coordinator could love. But, it's also the kind of unflashy measure that makes everything else possible. As volunteers stay and gain experience they build closer connections with teachers and students, and build skills for their role. On the other hand, turn over is disruptive to cl...

​"13 months old!"  Or "One year and one month!"(Which sounds less like I forgot when to do the "hey it's been a year post" and more like "I ​meant​ to celebrate in January"?)Either way, this blog had a birthday (December 9th), and I'm celebrating it now. I asked text analyzer (with an assist from wordle) what I'd been writing ab...

​Every month, I email our volunteers about their hours. Last month I also asked about moments. Specifically, favorite moment from their time in adult education this fall.And they came back with some beautiful responses: I read these responses and thought... Yep. It's powerful to see students learning. I probably would have said 'ah ha mom...

It's been a rush of a fall. And in the day to day of it, it can be hard to pull back and look at the big picture of how it's going. But, I found a few minutes to do it, recently. And this is what I saw: When I look at this data --  one of my first impulses is to quibble and minimize. (Maybe you share this challenge too?) But a second...

3 weeks into the new fiscal year, more than a month since most classes ended, firmly settled into 'summer', I think I have all of the data I am going to get for the last year. So I tallied it up, ran it through my spreadsheet, did some math. HTM volunteers gave 1771.25 hours of their time this year.and smiled.  That's an 11% inc...