Everything I needed to know about EVkids, I learned in about 60 seconds, 2 weeks before I started the job, from a high-five between a teenager and an octogenarian.
After I accepted the position at EVkids, I attended the annual Moving On Ceremony and sat in the audience while 8th graders, a high school senior, and college seniors were congratulated on their next steps, and then stood for pictures. That year, amid the 40 or so tutees was just one high school senior, Jasmine, who had been an EVkid for 9 years. As with everyone else, staff read a short paragraph about Jasmine’s accomplishments, interests, and future plans, and handed her a book about surviving college life, signed by all the staff like a yearbook. Jasmine smiled good-naturedly, only slightly embarrassed by the attention, and then walked down the center aisle towards her seat next to her sister.
As she approached the front row, a petite, white-haired woman sitting on the aisle put a hand up in the air, and Jasmine gave her an enthusiastic high five and kept walking.
I understood EVkids in that moment.
The white-haired woman was EVkids co-founder Marie-Claude Thompson, who first met Jasmine as a 10-year-old kid following her sister Kathy’s footsteps to EVkids. For 9 years, Jasmine and Marie-Claude saw each other once a week when Jasmine met with her EVcorps tutor in the basement of St. Christopher’s Church, and then every day for a week or two at EVkids summer camp in Vermont. That’s more than I saw my own grandparents when I was Jasmine’s age.
Jasmine and Marie-Claude's unassuming, discreet high-five was all I needed to know about EVkids, and the memory of it has come back to me over and over as I got to know the organization, its history, and its people.
EVkids is a place kids come to for tutoring, sure, and certainly for mentoring. We provide social work services and support for families, and certainly we close the loop between parents, teachers, and tutors, to weave a strong community of support for each kid. And those things are important, but they’re not the heart of EVkids.
The heart is when tutors from the 1980s make Christmas donations every year, or when tutors from the 2000s send us their first child’s birth announcements. It’s when a tutee runs to Tutoring because he has a new college acceptance letter to share, or when a tutor and tutee who both graduated last spring meet up for dinner just because. The heart is when we find out that a senior got accepted to college, and I call my mom, in Florida, who’s never met these kids, because I’m so excited.
Jasmine graduated with a Bachelor's degree in biology last summer. She is the first person in her family to earn a college degree. I have goosebumps just typing that sentence.
EVkids is about relationships, and authentic connections. It’s about creating a community that stays with you wherever you go. It’s about being a whole human being, with a heart and soul. It’s about knowing where to find the people you need when you need them.
It’s about the high-five moments.
