A Post-Sandy Reflection on Mission-Driven Work

With a good portion of New York City without power (myself included) and still reeling from the impact of Hurricane Sandy, I wanted to take a moment to reflect upon the dedication of my coworkers. Subways are closed. Buses are stopping along their normal routes about fifty percent of the time because they are so packed. Traffic lights aren't functioning downtown, and traffic everywhere is at a standstill.  Despite all this, many employees at the New York Center for Child Development are carrying on, business as usual (or at least, as usual as possible). One of my coworkers had her husband drive her two hours through the city gridlock so she could be here today. Another walked 50 blocks uptown when the overcrowded buses continued to pass her by. Another rode her bicycle in--from Brooklyn. I am amazed by their dedication and committment to their work.  These extreme circumstances affirm how motivating a meaningful mission can be. I realize more and more every day that, for me, finding a career driven by a strong mission is the key to remaining personally fulfilled in my work. Even when my day-to-day tasks become mundane here--compiling the results of a survey on a training given to 55 daycare workers is not the most intellectually stimulating of projects--I still remain eager to work because of my belief in my organization's mission and because of the obvious enthusiasm and passion of the people working around me. And when the work does become more exciting--such as meeting with the Weill Cornell child psychiatry team to discuss how we can better integrate our new early childhood mental heath consulation and treatment program into their practice--that makes the mission that much more tangible and motivating.

To everyone affected by the storm, I hope you are all staying safe, and that life returns to normal as quickly as possible!

Reading for Fun…with a Side of Edification

Here are some coincidences about Hurricane Sandy (which is approaching the D.C. region as I type).  On the work side, Character Education Partnership’s National Forum on Character Education is slated for 1-3 November, and CEP’s founder was Sandy McDonnell ’45.  On the personal side, I was in D.C. during Fall Break last year and there weathered a peculiar Halloween storm as well.

On Tuesday I went to Hooray 4 Books in Alexandria to buy two birthday presents (a book for my former supervisor’s daughter and a plush cat for me since my birthday is on Halloween).  It’s a children’s toy and book store similar to Jazams in Palmer Square but with more books.  One of the major highlights of the post-Princeton life, at least for this liberal arts major, is having the brain space to read for fun.  I can read poetry just because I want to, not because I’m endeavouring to “fill the well,” as Julia Cameron says, in order to get the poetic juices flowing.  I have time to read Health magazine for its exercise tips because I will be studying to become a health coach through the Institute of Integrative Nutrition.  My fellow fellow, Sweta, and I were discussing reading for pleasure while we assembled name badges at CEP yesterday (Saturday).  It’s a blast to have the freedom to read!

Reading about character education at work has also primed me to see it everywhere; when reading the flyer for new titles coming soon to Hooray 4 Books, most of the picture and chapter books used anthropomorphic animals to teach some sort of moral lesson (including the very-chic lesson of ecofriendly behavior).  This is hardly a novel idea, of course!

AlumniCorps Love

As a second-year fellow, I oftentimes evaluate the differences between my current fellowship and my previous one. How are the organizations structured differently? How do the office cultures compare? How is the fellow being utilized differently at each organization? What do the different PP55 steering committees do to bring all the fellows together? And, perhaps most importantly, how can I use my experiences from last year to add more value to my organization and my experience this year?

A really wonderful answer to this last question hit me full force at the New York PP55 Welcome Dinner this past week: always remember and leverage the staple of support that is the broader AlumniCorps community. I never fully appreciated the value of networking until I met some very helpful contacts at the AlumniCorps social events during my time in DC, and this week I was nicely reminded of that generosity and desire to help the fellows succeed that always characterized my interactions with other Princeton alums last year. Earlier in the day, two members of the New York PP55 steering committee (including one of the PP55 founders) brought the new AlumniCorps Executive Director to visit my supervisor and me at New York Center. It was really nice to have the opportunity to talk to all of them about my work and my organization's mission and to see firsthand how much they care about each individual fellow. I was struck yet again by the passion that drives this program at the Welcome Dinner, when Scott Taylor and his wife opened up their lovely home to all of the New York fellows, mentors, and steering committee members. Everyone I spoke to was genuinely interested in learning about my fellowship, my interests, and my career aspirations. Not only did I enjoy getting to know one of my two mentors (yes, I have two--did I mention how much I love the support I'm getting?!), I also exchanged emails with another fellow's mentor who, like me, is also looking into serving on a nonprofit junior board and offered to send me some information on it. I left the dinner feeling truly fortunate to have such an incredible community of smart, successful, and above all, caring individuals who really just want to help me in any way they can. It was definitely a nice way to end the night!

Two months in

I've been at my position at the Character Education Partnership (CEP) now for about the duration of most of my past internships. It's interesting that I finally feel as though I have a real niche. Now that last year's fellow, who overlapped with me for the first month of my fellowship, has left, I have the interesting and novel feeling of basically being the organization's point person on a number of things. I feel like I have real ownership of my projects. Currently, CEP is gearing up for the National Forum on Character Education, from November 1-4, a major conference with 800 attendees. Along with my supervisor, I am currently doing the bulk of administrative tasks, registration and marketing for the Forum.

I think my placement at CEP can potentially be a great one for someone thinking of going into teaching. Though there is no direct interaction with students, you're surrounded by teachers and former teachers pretty constantly and can gain an interesting window into the more social-emotional side of learning. The fellow has me considering not just teaching but also school psychology, counseling and social work.

A Day

There was no escaping that the title of this blog post was going to be a reference to either an egotistical cliché, “A Day in the Life of” or a song, “A Day,” by Clan of Xymox.

Since one of the purposes of this blog is to provide a little snapshot of the lives of fellows, I figured I’d go through my day.  As I noticed—and as the presenters addressed—at the first D.C. Project 55 seminar on “Careers in Non-Profits,” the narrative distance of a panel or blog makes one’s life look a lot more seamless than it actually is.

To the Princeton student who’s reading this, I begin like Maimonides in his epistolary introduction to The Guide of the Perplexed, “this is for you and others like you.”

Disclaimers made, let’s go into granular detail.  On weekdays, I wake up a bit after four and do my morning pages.  I followed Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way before beginning at Princeton and I wrote my thesis on her program and other creative recovery programs.   I meditate and then go exercise in the fitness center in the townhouse development where my aunt and uncle live.  I live with them for a few reasons: my uncle offered me a deal on rent I can’t refuse, my car insurance is cheaper in Virginia than in the Capital (et tu, The Hunger Games?), and I’ve always lived with family during summers and for internships and whatnot.  I return home, shower, dress, drink my green juice, eat my oatmeal, and my uncle drops me off at a metro station on his way to work. 

I start work at 07:30.  Besides entering information into Character Education Partnership’s development database, I sometimes design cards, make phone calls to encourage schools, business, and others to attend CEP’s National Forum on Character Education, compile and send thank-you notes, execute fundraising research, and sort accounting files.  I leave the office to eat lunch since I don’t believe in eating where you work.  There’s a more vulgar way to say that, but I’ll leave it to your imagination.  I drink 4/7 of my lunch since I cannot chew all I need to sustain myself in 30 minutes (juicing…that’s why my parents gave me a high-speed blender as a graduation present). 

Once a week CEP gathers for a staff meeting, and I attend other meetings as the need arises.  I currently take notes for the fundraising committee meetings since I will be doing quite a bit of data entry as the new director of development writes a new fundraising plan.  Working with a supervisor who telecommutes from across the country is probably not for everyone; I get along very well with her, which means we communicate clearly.  As one of my coworkers said this week, a “certain synergy” comes from working in an office with fellow humans.  Sabrina is right on in her observations about forced face time not really being downtime.  Adjectives fail me to describe how much I dislike staring at a computer all day.

I metro back to Alexandria and walk home.  Sometimes I have to feed my aunt and uncle’s two cats.  I eat supper, which is usually a portion of a dish I made on the weekend.  I assemble the juices and grains for the next day.  I take a walk around Alexandria, and then I come home, pick out the next day’s clothes, shower, read a little sacred text, and go to bed hopefully before 21:00. 

Wash, rinse, repeat.  One of my weekend days involves cooking whatever I find at the Alexandria farmers’ market, and one of my weekend days involves going to church.

That’s it for the extreme detail.   Best regards to you, Princeton senior, and go back to work on your thesis!

Three months in

I realize this post is long overdue. In late June, the morning after I had gotten back from my Spain vacation that I had barely been able to squeeze in after graduation, I started work at the Heads Up! Pediatric Literacy Program. After being on the job for three months, my perspective on my role in this nonprofit has swayed back and forth between the good and the (somewhat) bad, and I supposed I'd talk a bit about that here.

As coordinator of the literacy program, your job is essentially to keep the program running and functioning. There are books that need to be restocked two floors above my office, right inside of the clinic where doctors will have access to them. There are volunteers - retired women, mostly - who run the book carts, report back to you about whatever is needed, and pleasantly chat with you about your weekend and plans for the future. There are also multiple locations in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens that must be visited, maintained, and well stocked with books. The coordinator is in charge of buying and receiving these books, once the program has received its thousands of dollars of funding. The coordinator also has the freedom to use downtime, of which there has been plenty in the past couple of weeks, to decide what aspects of the program can be improved and to take charge and implement those changes.

When I started working here, I was excited yet quite terrified. My predecessor, Ben, had been very good about guiding me for our one week of overlap, but I didn't know how I would handle this entire program once he left. When he did leave, I'd often send  him sheepish text messages asking about where certain book locations were, usually because I'd already walked around the area several times and couldn't for the life of me remember anything. That's the thing about this job - once the previous fellow leaves, you realize just how independent this job really is. Even though I was scared of screwing up, I embraced this job's freedom and felt like this would provide me a fantastic and certainly unique opportunity as a new college grad. I still do embrace it, but there are certainly negatives to working in such an independent atmosphere.

One reason is that it's difficult to get feedback on whatever it is you're working on. My boss is absolutely wonderful, and she is always there to help and to talk to when I need her. However, she has her own, many responsibilities as a child psychologist in Weill Cornell, and I often prefer to not distract her with the day to day business of the job. Also, when you encounter frustrating things -- such as ordering books from absolutely incompetent book vendors, who force you to spend weeks talking to customer service representatives, inconvenience you with several instances of miscommunication, and send you completely incorrect book shipments -- it's easy to wish that there was somebody else there who could also help out, or somebody to at least vent to while on the job.

In these past few months, I've learned that this job certainly isn't perfect. Of course, no job is perfect, as there will always be people you don't enjoy interacting with, as well as annoyances that pop up. However, I know that it's important that these day to day things don't get to me too much. After all, it's the goal and mission of this job that I'm working for -- the goal to keep this program running so that the children we serve, who have so little access to outside resources and are at risk for developmental and cognitive delays, have access to new books every time they visit the doctor. Those children, who light up when they receive their books, and who cry and beg their mothers to let them stay just a liiiiiitle longer in the hospital so that they can read with us, are the ones who make this job worth it. This job is a process of learning the importance of overlooking the smaller problems to work toward the greater goals.

Maximizing downtime

Today, the folks at my office experienced a morning and afternoon of technological limbo. We have been in the midst of a server upgrade since last week and the people from our Internet Service Provider (who will not be named) were in the office doing some work today. As a result, we were offline for most of the day and not just that – we had to log out of our computers.

Since we could not use our desktops, I was unable to do my normal tasks such as replying to e-mails and compiling documents. Instead, I wandered over to where Mary, my fellow PP55 fellow, sits and we had a conversation. What happened was that we saw people we don’t normally see creep out of their offices and talk to each other. (I’m guilty of the same thing – sitting with my headphones on and my door closed when I’m taking minutes from conference calls.)

Mary and I were discussing our social media efforts when a brainwave hit – why don’t we grab some photos of the staff at the Housing Development Fund and post a sound-bite from each of them on our Facebook page? This could give prospective clients a better idea of who the people “behind-the-scenes” are and what they actually do.

This led to a conversation about photographers and events with our Director of Operations, Joanne, who sits in an office near Mary. This was when we realized that we really should make sure we have the personal contact information of the event photographer we really like, so that we keep in touch even if she were to leave the company she is working for right now.

Later on, our colleague Debbie, the Director of Counseling, came over and told us about a credit workshop she was going to run in the afternoon. I asked her if we could take a look at her slides since Mary and I were just starting out in terms of building our credit history. Not only did we get to read the slides, but Debbie also gave us a nutshell version of her workshop which was really useful.

And then, since the computers were still not online, Mary and I joined in a massive collective effort led by Valerie, our Director of Lending, to organize our filing system – checking and ordering the client files alphabetically from left-to-right, and removing damaged dividers in the drawers. Since we had five people sorting through the drawers, we got that done within an hour.

Takeaways? Downtime doesn’t need to be wasted time. It can be the time to do important things (like doing "maintenance" for the filing system) that usually take a backseat when we are constantly barraged by e-mails and other tasks. Downtime is a great time to connect with colleagues face-to-face. This might be that opportunity to walk over and learn from the expertise of someone else in your organization. In the midst of your conversations, you might even come up with some innovative ideas. Come to think about it, downtime can be pretty productive too.