Category: Overheard at Council

Overheard at Council: Supporting Young People Through COVID-19

Posted on by robbie

As adults struggle to understand the impact COVID-19 will have on us and our communities, we have an important opportunity for connection with the young people in our lives. We held an inter-generational conversation designed for adults and teens, ages 13 to 18, with David Shapiro, CEO of MENTOR, Dr. Bruce D. Perry, Senior Fellow of the ChildTrauma Academy, and Dr. Torie Weiston-Serdan, the founder of Youth Mentoring Action Network. Together, we explored the intersectionality of this crisis and how we can best support our young people through it.
In the hope that these might serve you on your mission to make this world a better place, we’re sharing out some of the key moments from our discussion.
Insights:

  • You need routine, but you need a different routine right now–start with physical routines, family meal routines, give yourself reflective time (and fill in school and other obligations from there).

  • Open conversions with youth are important. They are often underestimated. Honesty, straight facts and education can help.

  • The single unifying factor that predicts resilience and the ability to heal from past trauma is connectedness–someone or the people who value you.

Practices:

  • Employ youth. Ask them to facilitate webinars as paid work to replace other work that once supported their family.

  • Parse experiences into smaller, manageable moments. Having more predictable moments of stress can build resilience.

  • When in doubt, reach out. Relational moments will get us through this. Listen to others’ reality.

Recommendations and Resources: 

 

Overheard at Council: Leadership During a Moment of Great Uncertainty

Posted on by robbie

In early April, Wendy Kopp, CEO and Co-founder of Teach For All, and Gerald Chertavian, founder and CEO of YearUp, stopped by the NationSwell Council’s digital table for a conversation about how the social impact leaders we convened can navigate this uncertain and challenging time, leveraging the disruption and chaos as a potential opportunity to learn and scale our reach and impact.
In the hope that these might serve you on your mission to make this world a better place, we’re sharing out some of the key moments from our discussion. These insights and practices and recommendations all come straight to you from Wendy, Gerald and some of the other inspiring Council members in attendance.
Insights:
“People have such various entry points, like grappling with personal struggles, deep concerns or having lost loved ones to really being fixated on the questions of how we evolve the way we work right now and what we’re called upon to do right now, to being open to what world is going to emerge from this, and what our role coming out of that will be. I’ve just found that holding open spaces has helped us meet people’s personal needs, become clear very quickly in a shared way about what our immediate priorities are and also, continue with the open space around medium term to long term questions about what we need to evolve into as the world around us is evolving.” — Wendy Kopp
“I know there’s light at the end of this tunnel. I know we’ll emerge from it and feel confident about that. But I also know, man, it’s a heck of a long time. And the more folks I talk to who are out in the private sector space who have really good visibility onto this tell me this isn’t one or two quarters, it’s not it’s not six months. This is a couple of years for us to figure out how to get back on our feet. How do you help your team realize it’s not a firefight?” — Gerald Chertavian
“The thing that we turned to almost immediately is just holding space for our global team, and the teams within those teams. Not a day goes by when I don’t have big, open space — probably more than one — where we’ll break down into small groups and really just check in. And we’ve found that that has been helpful.” — Wendy Kopp
“Some of us will come out stronger, but in some parts of the world, this [pandemic is] going to be just extraordinarily devastating. I just hope that our development response recognizes what we’re seeing in the world right now, which is that local leadership matters and the degree to which we can figure out how to help local folks build the volition, the capabilities, and the networks to become globally informed rather than trying to, as we generally do in development, rain down solutions around the world.” — Wendy Kopp
Practices:
“Set up principles very early on. We will have to make very hard choices, so what are the principles that guide those decisions? Principles like: whatever we do, it’s got to be top down. Also, we want to use an equity lens as we make decisions. If we look at whatever decisions we make, do they pass those principles as best we can, and are we also thinking about the bias that can creep into those decisions and trying to eliminate it.” — Gerald Chertavian
“Whatever we decide now, we want to look back in a couple years’ time and feel like we made the very best decisions we could. And so as we make decisions, let’s also look out and ask, ‘Would we be happy, or not, with these decisions? Do we feel we’ve lived our values well?’” — Gerald Chertavian
“With every stakeholder group, we just need constant, constant, constant communication, probably a lot more than we — at least I — would naturally gravitate towards. But I’m really trying to embrace it because I know it’s just crucial right now.” — Wendy Kopp
“There is a new world coming if we’re ready to listen for it. One of the most important things right now is to actually hold the uncertainty and not jump to solutions. Really consider whether we’re asking the right questions so that we can see the real possibilities as we look out beyond the immediate and see what emerges, and really lean into this chance to actually be part of shaping what really could be a better world.” — Wendy Kopp
**
Welcome to Overheard at Council, a series capturing insights, practices, recommendations and other powerful moments from some of our NationSwell Council events. If you have any feedback on this series, or if you attended and you’d like to add something you think we might have missed, please reach out via email. To find out more about the NationSwell Council, visit our digital hub.

Overheard at Council: The Joys and Challenges of Modern Parenthood

Posted on by robbie

Members of the NationSwell Council recently gathered around the digital table to discuss the ways that modern parenthood as evolved, and to talk about how the social impact leaders in attendance could better support the needs of parents in the modern workplace — especially amid a pandemic that threatens the health, safety and economic stability of families.
In the hope that these might serve you on your mission to make this world a better place, we’re sharing out some of the key moments we heard from our discussion. These insights and practices come straight to you from the inspiring Council members in attendance.
Insights:
 

  • “When we men are in larger groups, we talk about sports, we talk about business, we talk about failures at work and how we rebounded from those. But we don’t do that same kind of conversation as well as it relates to our families.”

 

  • “When you’re raised by a single mom, there isn’t a line of demarcation in terms of what women do and what men do. Everything was provided by a loving parent. So the benefit is that when I had an opportunity to become a parent, I didn’t go into what I believe to be my space in terms of this is what a father does. I just loved as a parent and I’m learning. I’ve had wins and losses for sure along the way, but that’s kind of how it started.”

 

  • “To be a successful co-parent, I treat all our agreements as a living breathing document. It’s not ironclad, it’s concepts that we agree upon, but everything else is conversation. When something like coronavirus comes, I want to be able to call my daughter’s mom and say, ‘Hey look, I know that this is my weekend or this is your weekend, but what looks best for her?’ As opposed to, “The rule says that the child is here.” For some people that works, and I certainly don’t want to negate anybody’s situation. That’s the other thing, everybody has to create a situation that works for them, but ours is founded on communication.”

 

  • “If having dinner with the family is something that’s important to you, or seeing your kids at the end of the day… kids don’t stay up that late, so we can’t come home at 8:30 at night and expect to see your five year old. Is there a way for the modern workplace to be flexible, and let people leave at 5:00 and then come back online at 8:00? That’s not going to work for every workplace, and that in some ways is a little bit of a privileged conversation, because I think the people whose workplaces have those kind of jobs tend to be richer and have other advantages.”

 

  • “As we pull kids out of school, one of the things I think is the most damaging about that is that for kids with highly educated parents, it’s going to be fine, their parents are going to spend a bunch of time trying to figure out what’s the best distance learning-this and enrichment-that, and how can we get an extra violin lesson in every week. Then there are a lot of kids whose parents are really struggling, especially given what’s going to happen to the economy, who are not going to have those kind of things. They have to keep those kids out for six months, that’s a relay significant learning loss. I haven’t seen as much discussion of that as I think that we need to be having.”

 
Practices:
 

  • “[Take] the time to step back and hold a mirror up to yourself and say, ‘What do I really want to be true about my parenting? What’s aligned to my core principles and values?”

 

  • “Spend a lot more deliberate time making sure that we don’t let work deteriorate the safe space that is supposed to be home. Kids should to some extent be able to run and play in their home, without feeling like I’m a burden or I am a bother to mom or dad, or whoever the caregiver can be.”

 

  • “Make what’s called a reading island. My daughter and I have one, and it’s real simple. My bed is the reading island, so she’s able to get whatever book she wants, and I’ll get whatever my reading material is, the caveat is that we can’t do actual work. So it’s not for homework, it’s not for me taking my laptop, the only technology that we have is the cellphone timer, and she can also use snacks. For 30 minutes, we read to ourselves and she can have whatever snacks she wants, but we can’t get off the bed. We can’t get off the island — the island is surrounded by sharks, or piranhas or there’s a storm.”

 

  • “Look at [the coronavirus disruption that has parents working and kids learning from home] as an opportunity to engage in positive ways with your kids that you might otherwise have been pulled in one way or another. Make the most of time together.”

 

  • “Organize Zoom calls for your kids to talk to their friends! We spend so much time trying to get our kids to have these tools, but we don’t always create the space for them to use it. And so I think for them to have an opportunity to engage with each other in this new way that their parents are figuring out, giving them the same space and opportunity to explore it and to get some things that they may be going through off of their chest, I think that can be valuable as well for them — and it might buy you 20 or 30 minutes that you don’t have to look over their shoulder.”

Welcome to Overheard at Council, a new series capturing insights, practices, recommendations and other powerful moments from some of our NationSwell Council events. These quotes have been edited for clarity. If you have any feedback on this series, or if you attended and you’d like to add something you think we might have missed, please reach out via email. To find out more about the NationSwell Council, visit our digital hub.