Interview: Good Neighbor Center's Virtual and In-person Programming during the Pandemic

Amanda Jacobson, the Program Coordinator for the Good Neighbor Center, shared her insights on trauma-informed student support, the partnerships that allow them to supplement with virtual learning, and how they were able to stay open for in-person drop-in services during the pandemic.

Could you tell me a little bit about the history of the Good Neighbor Center?

We’ve been around for about 25 years, but we've only had our current name for the last six years. We focus on supporting young people in their search for knowledge. We do a lot of homework help, as well as practicing important literacy, math, and life skills. We work with many young people that have English as a second or even third language.

Does your program offer virtual tutoring?

Officially in June or July, we partnered with current volunteer Ankitha Kumar, who has created a free virtual tutoring platform called ConneXions Tutoring, and have referred people to them if they weren’t comfortable doing on-site tutoring. We also referred new families there, as we’re currently not taking new families to our on-site program to keep it small.

Literacy Mentors from the University of Minnesota are also going to work with us in the future to help offer additional virtual support, since universities are no longer allowing their students to do service hours in-person.

How has your student retention been?

We run a drop-in style program, so prior to the pandemic, we’d have about 130-150 students enrolled, with 60-80 students a night during the school year and about 40 a night during summer. And now we’re getting 30 students a night during the school year, socially distanced throughout our building.

How has your volunteer retention been?

From our original volunteer pool, we’ve retained three out of probably 50 former volunteers. The bulk of our volunteers are older professionals and new retirees, and since the pandemic they’ve been quarantined. They’ll do Zoom sessions with students as needed, but we haven’t had many requests for that, since there’s more demand for in-person. The universities who send college student volunteers to fulfill their in-person service hours are not currently requiring it, so that’s another big volunteer loss.

Our new volunteers are a lot more young professionals who have more time and flexibility now that they’re working from home. We get about 20 volunteers per night, out of a group of 20-50 tutors total on a rotating basis. Because we’ve changed the way we do programming on-site, we put an entire family in a group with a single tutor to minimize the number of people they come in contact with. So because people are no longer rotating, we need more tutors!

What is the biggest barrier you’ve found in virtual tutoring options?

We talk to families and set them up with either option, whichever they’d prefer. They are feeling the “tech fatigue;” that’s the biggest cause of resistance to it. The people who need help have responsibilities at home and that makes it harder for them to focus when working at home. Being flexible for families and students is important—what are the learners' needs and how can we help with that?

Have you been able to offer any help to students needing assistance accessing virtual resources?

For one first grader, they were doing distance learning and the school didn’t have a tablet for them, and they couldn’t afford one, so they were using their mom's phone to do distance learning. So we were able to get a Chromebook for him so he can have what he needs.

We’ve spent so much on chargers and plugs because the kids go through so many, and we’re trying to reduce barriers in order to make the distance learning piece of this current educational system as accessible and easy as possible, so we buy a lot of cords. It’s been a lot of on-the-fly stuff. One thing we’ve done is give out more treats—everyone is limited on what they can do, but we can give a little dessert with their dinner when they come in for tutoring.

Did any aspect of your professional background lend itself to the work you’re doing during the pandemic?

I have a background in mental healthcare, so I know it’s important to have trauma-informed practices in our work, and this pandemic is a trauma. So it’s helpful to have a name for it, and to acknowledge that this will be a stressful time and we don’t know how long it’s going to be. To name it and process it can be a big help.

How has the Good Neighbor Center been in such a great position to stay open and serve so many families in-person during the pandemic?

While a lot of other programs are losing funding and struggling with losing building space, we’ve been lucky that we didn’t have to deal with those kinds of things. We’re privately funded for the most part, so our director was able to say that over summer we'd focus on supporting the families first and figure out schooling later. We’ve been able to stay open because we’re smaller than the YMCA or the school system, and we don’t rely on others for space.

What informed your decision to keep in-person services open?

The bulk of our students are English language learners and it’s so hard to give certain cues virtually, so our director gave us what we needed to create an in-person learning environment that would support the kids and still be safe.

What does an evening of drop-in tutoring look like?

Our goal is homework first from 7:30 to 8:30, and then we ask that they spend the remainder of the evening on different academic enrichment activities, with a focus on reading, writing, and math. If our students come early they can play games or do coloring, and manipulatives like legos are very popular, so we put a small bin on several tables because they’re not allowed to take from other tables. There’s also a snack.

How have you handled physical resources during the pandemic?

We encourage students to take home books and especially games, because families need things to do at home! The students are very into graphic novels right now, so every month we go out and buy a lot more so they can take them home and bring them back so they get cleaned and can be given to another student. They also have the option to keep it. We don’t have a formal check-out system. But everything that comes back to us goes into bins and gets fully sanitized before being made available to students again.

Do you think that you will continue to have virtual learning options post-pandemic?

There will be a place for virtual learning as students request; we are a "homework first" type of site. The shape of homework and learning has changed and is changing so that homework may or may not be as much of a thing and our job would be to support a love of learning and be a resource for students to receive a variety of academic supports. Our job at GNC is to figure out what resources we have that support our students and their families—with their input. We envision there will be an increased virtual support system but we primarily are an on-site, in-person program.