Nicole Lynn Lewis is the founder and CEO of Generation Hope, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that supports teen parents who are pursuing college degrees. The organization supports the students in their program — whom Generation Hope refers to as scholars — with tuition assistance, one-on-one mentoring, and case management. Additionally, the organization and its volunteer and partner network provide support for students’ young children through literacy and social-emotional learning interventions, parenting-support services, and child care. Students receive support until they earn their two- or four-year degree. Lewis has a personal connection to the challenges the students face: She was a student-parent herself.
Lewis spoke with the Chronicle about how her organization and the families it serves have adjusted to remote work and the cascading consequences of school closures for parenting college students, who are experiencing the crisis on multiple fronts.
It feels like everything’s changed in a matter of three or four weeks. Organizationally, we were working on so many exciting new things. We were beginning to have conversations with national funders. Our scholars were focused on coming back from spring break and finishing this semester strong. And we were working to secure some paid internships for them going into the summer.
On March 4, we were doing one of our first listening sessions at our office about launching some national work helping colleges and universities across the country better serve parenting college students. Our board president came. She has a global-events company, and because her whole business is getting people gathered together in large numbers, she was seeing events starting to cancel. She pulled me aside, and she was like, “This is going to be really bad.”
We knew it was spreading in the United States, but it still felt like something that wasn’t really going to have a huge impact on our daily lives. And certainly we weren’t really thinking about it impacting our families in the way that it has.
She said to me, “You need to start preparing for this to have a major impact on your families and on the organization.” That’s when I started pulling together our leadership team to talk about what could be coming down the pike. Before we knew it, things started moving so rapidly, and we quickly advanced into moving everything to remote.
That was hard because as an organization, we are very relationship-based with our scholars and our scholars’ children. We believe in the importance of face-to-face time with them and laughing together and experiencing life together. So it was not an easy decision to say we have to move everything — from our trainings to our case management to our monthly home visits — to remote. For us, the number-one priority was creating as much consistency for our families as possible.
We’re about 16 staff, and we operate out of an office in D.C., but we basically cover the entire metro region with our services. We support 100 different scholars who are attending 20 different two- and four-year community colleges and universities across the region. We often go to where our students are. As the CEO, I’m all across the region fundraising and spreading awareness and even traveling outside of the region to do that.
In addition to our students, we have about 122 children in the program as well. We have around 120 mentors, and then we have different volunteers that come together at different points in the year, providing free child care at all of our events for our students. Altogether, about 300 volunteers annually.
We started talking about the different groups of people that we needed to communicate with. Everyone from our board to our staff, to all of our families, to all of their mentors, and then thinking through our foundation partners, our funders, our volunteers, other nonprofit organizations we work with.
Our messaging wasn’t just about how we were shutting down the office and saying we’re working remotely. We really thought it was important for people to understand how Covid is impacting our families and their ability to continue in college, to be able to provide, to be there for their children, and to just survive.
‘It’s really a sliding slope.’
Our families are already dealing with so much. For some people, Covid is introducing them to issues and problems that our scholars have been dealing with for a long time. Housing insecurity, job insecurity, domestic-violence issues, food insecurity. All of the things that some people are just now starting to deal with, those are things that our scholars have had to navigate for a long time. And, so, helping people to understand how difficult it is to now have this added on top was really important for us.
We focused on getting the message out to everybody, conveying to our scholars that we were still going to be just as committed to them.
At least nine of our scholars have lost hours or been furloughed because of the virus. Many of our scholars are in service or health care industries and are still going to work despite the risks. A lot of our scholars don’t have the opportunity to work from home. They’re working in retail or in positions that require them to be front facing. And so many of them who are hourly are continuing to go to work. Their family members often are having to go to work as well. They might work in service industries like restaurants or hotels or janitorial services. They don’t have the luxury of social distancing. We also know of several scholars who have lost financial support from parents and others due to job losses from Covid.
Many of our scholars have expressed mental-health challenges related to the isolation and anxiety of the situation. Some of our scholars are struggling with being in toxic, even abusive home situations that they now can no longer leave due to stay-at-home orders in response to the outbreak.
Child care is an issue. As school districts have closed, it’s been really rough because many of our scholars are depending on school to be primary child care. Most are having to keep their children home for the foreseeable future. Many are struggling to balance their own schoolwork with home-schooling their children. Schools are transitioning to online classes, and some of our scholars don’t have access to the technology that’s required to make that shift, so we’ve been working to get them laptops and hot spots and access to Wi-Fi. This transition could be really hard for students who might find it hard to engage with college in that way and then have the added issues of not having child care and access to technology.
We’ve tried to think about how can we make it super easy for them. We’ve been compiling a list of high-quality online instruction that can keep their kiddos occupied. That doesn’t totally solve the child-care issue, but it helps. And we’re trying to stay abreast of the policy changes that are also coming down the pike, like having more access to unemployment support, for example. This is kind of unfolding every minute. It’s not something we can solve, but we can at least make it easier for them to access the information.
We’re really concerned about our scholars being able to do well in their online courses. If they don’t do well in a class, that could have an impact on their financial aid going forward. If they have a dip in their GPA, that impacts their completion rates. It’s kind of a sliding slope. What does that mean for their ability to move forward toward their degree?
We had set up a paid internship for one of our students, and now that’s not going to come through. We’re anticipating that’s going to happen with a lot of our corporate partners. Our students aren’t in a place where they could take an unpaid internship. And given the economy, are they going to be able to get jobs if they graduate in May?
New ways to help, including virtual tutoring
We’ve had to be very creative in our network and thinking about the ways that people might be able to give during this crisis. People may have an extra laptop that they don’t use or may be willing to purchase one and send it our way.
We also included information for how people could give to our emergency fund because we’re anticipating an uptick in requests as this goes on. That’s really resonated with some people who want to be able to provide that emergency aid directly to our students so that they can get through this.
We’re crunching numbers now, but we’re looking at needing about $500,000 to be able to meet the needs of our current scholars, to serve more families in the summer as planned, and to meet the technology costs associated with providing services remotely.
We’ve also shared the ways that people can virtually volunteer. We have a whole tutoring program that already existed and had an opportunity for people to tutor via Skype. With the shift to online learning for our students, we anticipate there is going to be a greater need for that.
Good and bad news from foundations
Last week, I had a foundation email me and say, “How can we help? What can we do?” That was amazing because so often nonprofits are reaching out and saying, “Please help us.” It was just really refreshing to see a foundation being proactive and trying to help their grantees.
I sent a ton of emails to different foundations that are providing support to say, “Here’s the current status. Here’s how this is impacting our families. This is what we anticipate.” Many of them wrote back and said, “We’re working on some emergency funding. And we’ll be back in touch.” Some of that funding is already kind of on its way. This is the time when we as nonprofits need really quick support with a lot of flexibility to be able to keep the lights on and keep up services for those that we serve.
On the flip side, we’ve definitely seen some foundations where we were in the pipeline for funding or just had been invited to submit a [letter of inquiry] or a proposal. We’re definitely having foundations write us now and say, “We’re having to concentrate on our current grantees, and we need to delay kind of this process.” That’s been hard.
Leadership matters, but so does taking care of yourself.
I just was thinking about how important it is for us to step up as leaders in moments of crisis. As nonprofit leaders, we are often immersed in the day-to-day of nonprofit work. But this is when leadership counts the most. Our families need it; the people who we serve need it. They need to see that we are more committed than ever. They need to see our faces. In a time like this, it’s hard because obviously we’re social distancing. But for example, I’m talking to my staff about doing weekly bedtime stories on Facebook Live with our families.
We have such an incredible staff and leadership team that I am really thankful for being able to pull them together and get their best thinking and ask for their help to think through some of the challenges.
And similarly with our board. You build your board with people who are incredibly smart and great at strategy and at supporting you and the organization through times like these. Boards really need to step up during crises.
Self-care is also really huge. Your organization needs you so much, so it’s really important that you are also focusing on yourself and what you need to be your best for your organization. Any way that you need to take care of yourself, try to make sure that you’re building that into your day because this can be overwhelming.
There are some days when I work from home that I could literally go straight 24 hours in front of my screen. So I pray on Scripture every morning. I intentionally get up throughout the day and play with my kids, or I’ll go outside and just walk around the yard with them, taking time to laugh with them and enjoy little things. I try to cook yummy meals for my family. I get joy out of that. And sometimes I sit down and watch a silly show — something that is not about a pandemic, not about nonprofit work or social justice, but just makes me laugh or takes me away from things.
My four kids range in age from 20 months to 20 years old. I was a teen mom myself. When I started at the College of William & Mary, my oldest was three months old. She is now a junior in college herself. With student housing closing, she’s back home.
Looking ahead
I was talking to someone who asked me if we were putting our strategic planning on hold. And I think we can’t. We have to be flexible and balance both. We’re both responding to the crisis and to the needs of our families. But at the same time, we have to be thinking about where we want to go as an organization and answering the tough questions about our future. When we do come through this, we want to be prepared for what’s on the other side. If we don’t continue to think strategically about the future, then that’ll be hard for us to do.
