In the long list of lessons the pandemic has taught us, one is: No matter how much you prepare, you may never actually be ready. And, even though we may have prepared, we still have to be able to abandon our plans and readjust to a completely different context at the drop of a hat. Our team is excited to announce the launch of our new virtual learning platform, LEARN>Without Limits.

As schools and programs embark on the varied Fall scenarios, I’ve fallen in step with other colleagues saying, “If we just had a little more information, we could at least make a plan.” In this post, we think about how navigating these unsettling times is like a dance.

Our hiring processes have to account for a number of different factors. Since many of us who have supervised OST programs received little or no training in effective staff recruitment, we wanted to share a few practices and principles that we’ve found to be effective for hiring staff who have the necessary skills and mindset for meeting the needs of the young people and families we serve.

Some organizations are going through another round of layoffs. People are on edge. No one feels like their best self right now. As a leader, how do you keep your team going? How do you buoy their spirits? How do you continue to navigate these rocky waters—remotely? Here are some ideas.

One way to mitigate the negative effects of too much screen time is to make sure our video meetings are both productive and efficient, allowing us to cut down on those long hours of screen time while still accomplishing the important work.

Life has changed so drastically for all of us in the past several months and has forced us to “set up shop” in our homes overnight!  Going virtual is the new order of the day and has challenged us to find resourceful ways to make the best of our circumstances. DWL team member Belinda Passafaro gives tips to maintain professionalism while working remotely.

Because our world, our selves and our work are intertwined, today’s post offers reflection on what anti-racism means to us as humans and how you can embed anti-racism into your work through your organization’s professional development strategy.

Think about when you wanted to learn how to dice a fresh mango, how to launch your e-marketing campaign or how to facilitate a Zoom meeting for the first time. All of these things were “nice to know”s until they became “must know”s. And THAT is when you sought to learn them. That’s what adult learners do—we learn things we need to know, when we need to. Help your learners get the knowledge they need by starting your own online university.

It used to be that we could keep work at work and then come home to rest, relax and rejuvenate. Work life and home life could be—at least—physically separated. Over the past couple months, we’ve all been figuring out how to mix the two, some days more successfully than others. And that home-work paradox highlighted several other tensions we’ve been existing within. How do we do it?

Need help figuring out how to create an online professional development experience for your staff or network? We can help—starting with establishing your case for investing in online professional development now. If you need to communicate with your board, funders or partners that now is the time to invest in online professional development or that the funds currently tagged for programming (that isn’t occurring) should be reallocated to online PD, copy and paste today’s post into your own document to get started.

If you host a virtual happy hour and nobody comes, is it still worth doing? Do you find yourself wondering: What’s wrong? Why am I here in this virtual room, virtually alone (except for my kids playing and dog barking in the other room)? Read on to find out what to do if this happens to you.

You’ve been burning on both ends and if you don’t give yourself a minute to pause, you’ll burn out. Even outside the COVID-19 crisis, youth-serving leaders and staff suffer from burn out. Now, we’re five or six weeks into this isolated life with no clear end in sight and it’s time to take a break.