We all know that the true benefits of education are incalculable. As a teacher, having a student tell me at the end of the year "I learned I'm smarter than I thought I was" is worth more than any score on any standardized test, or any outcome measure the Dept. of Education can invent.And, yet. Not everyone has had that heart-melting exper...

I've been gathering some information about our students and our volunteers lately. I'll be sharing more of it later, but first up ... the languages we speakPerks of my job?  Opportunities to google new-to-me languages -- Brazilero (A Spanish/Portuguese dialect from the Uruguay/Brazil border region) and Sonike (which is spoken in Mali and ...

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...

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...

What does $20,000 get you?CNN sent reporters into Central Park to hear answers to this question. I've been pondering this question not because I have $20,000 to spend on Hawaiian vacations or student loan payoffs (popular answers in Central Park) but because last week, with January reports starting to come in, the value of volunteer time donat...

I love data ( you might have guessed that from my previous post) I love the way it can make a vague thing concrete and relatable. I like the challenge of setting up the right spreadsheet and formula to show something meaningful. I'll be honest, I appreciate the clear feedback and evidence of our success. So I had a lot of fun putting together ...

.Like everyone else I know, I split my professional time between my actual job and conversations about the weather,  paper jams in the photocopier, 'do we have any [insert random office supplies]?' and the other minutia of work-life.One gray day early this winter, I started my work day with a conversation that segued quickly to the news. Not a...