Breakfast Club Blog
The BOOST Breakfast Club Blog is a curated space where bloggers from around the world contribute content on a continual basis about a variety of topics relevant to in and out-of-school time. The BOOST Breakfast Club blog is at the heart of an ongoing dialogue where expanded learning and education professionals share their personal thoughts and stories from the in and out-of-school time field. They also tell us what they ate for breakfast!
The BOOST Breakfast Club Blog is Brain Food for In and Out-of-School Time Leaders!
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Collaboration, Gratitude and Birds (Yeah, Birds!)
As we enter the holiday season, I’m thankful to be coming up on my 10th year at the Alliance for a Healthier Generation. As Director of Community Partnerships, I have the unique pleasure of cultivating relationships to engage communities in promoting children’s health. For this article, I wanted to share three collaborations that I am particularly excited about – each with resources I hope you can use to bring wellness to life in out-of-school time while engaging families and empowering children...Read More
The Flawed Leader… Follow Up 6 Months Later
Social Power is defined as the degree of influence that an individual or organization has among their peers and within their society as a whole. 6 months ago, I shared in this blog my challenges with my own leadership and that of the organization I started and grew over the past 15 years. I poured out on the table the comments my staff made in relation to my leadership flaws, and the ways I needed to be better for my team. Since then I have openly spoken in three different states in front of lar...Read More
Coaching And Endless Possibilities
A quick story and important reminder about how important a good coach is, and what the possibilities are when you have a great coach. My son, who is in first grade, played rookie tackle football this fall. The season ended a few weeks ago, with his team winning the 1st-grade championship. It was a spectacular finish to the season—they got to play the game on the high school football field. Our town’s high school football team won the state championship last year, and so football is a pretty big ...Read More
Not Your Mother’s Meeting (PT 2)
Welcome back to Part 2 of Not Your Mother’s Meeting! If you missed Part 1, click here to catch up! Breakfast Club Blogger @jillgordon provides excellent inclusionary meeting ideas in order to create more participation and engagement for your staff. Enjoy! Make the Meeting Participatory Gain greater participation by posing three questions or next steps to the meeting participants. For small group discussions, try using small dry erase boards to generate ideas and questions. They are ext...Read More
A Relevant Repost! Tilling the Soil: Staff Turnover
Corn as high as an elephant’s eye? Why stop there? How is farming equivalent to staff turnover? The seeds are bought. The seller promised a yield surpassing anything ever seen before. Acre upon acre of corn growing much, much higher than an elephant’s eye. The new tractor had been purchased. Much better than the old tractor. And just for show, you bought new work gloves and some new boots. The rains had been good, the weather fair for growing. The table was set for record yields and...Read More
Not Your Mother’s Meeting: 4 Ways to Creating Meaningful Meetings (PT 1)
Do you ever go to a meeting and wonder why you came? Do your meetings lack the fun and energy that keep people engaged and ready to participate? Personally, I think meetings should be limited to an hour max (whenever possible). This year, I’ve had the pleasure of organizing and moderating our 2017 Youth Philanthropy Webinar Series, a four-part series designed to support next-gen leadership and giving opportunities through real-world examples and resources from experts all over the country. Th...Read More
BOOST 2018 Workshop RFPs due 10/31
BOOST requests workshop proposals that support and highlight trends, innovative research, and promising practices to support quality out-of-school time programs. The deadline to submit a workshop proposal for BOOST 2018 is Tuesday, October 31, at 5 pm PST. Any proposals submitted after this date will go on a waiting list. To submit a proposal, visit the BOOST Conference website and click on the blue button to start the application process. Every year the BOOST Conference offers a variety of work...Read More
4 Amazing Tips To Making Communities Healthier Through STEAM and Sports
If you are a regular BOOST Breakfast Club reader, you may have read my summer article, STEM and Wellness: Colliding Galaxies. The article explores a partnership sparked by a chance meeting at the 2017 BOOST Conference between the Alliance for a Healthier Generation and the National Girls Collaborative Project. Three months later and our educational brief, STEM and Wellness: A Powerful Equation for Equity, is now live! Here is the heart of the brief: Intentionally blending STEM/STEAM and wellness...Read More
Know a teen who’s social media savvy? Seeking High School Brand Ambassadors: College Board (SAT) Instagram Campaign + More!
Motivate Youth has launched an amazing campaign to promote college test prep, and has an exciting opportunity for high school students! Motivate is assembling a team of amazing teens to be High School Brand Ambassadors to mobilize an Instagram campaign promoting SAT test prep and a $10,000 sweepstakes giveaway. If you know a teen who is active on social media and loves creating and sharing Instagram content, Motivate Youth wants to hear from them! Share this application link with any high school...Read More
The Role and Vision of a CEO from a CEO
I have a lot of breakfast meetings these days, the hardest kinds of meetings. Not the kind where I get excited about pitching a program to a new client or get to brainstorm curriculum and advocate for youth. Those meetings I love. No, lately my days are filled with meetings wherein I talk—or, more often, listen– to people expressing real fear and vulnerability about their present and future. Not just people: my staff. In February 2017, I gave speech to my staff on “the state of Arc&#...Read More
Working Together: Heroes Through Collaboration
Quick, name any movie you can think of about education. Here are a few that immediately come to my mind: To Sir With Love…Stand and Deliver…Dangerous Minds…Dead Poets Society...Freedom Writers. As you made your list did you notice that they all tell a similar story – the story of a dedicated educator who essentially works alone, often against great odds, to reach out and inspire students? The individual hero-teacher appears not just in movies, but also on television shows, in t...Read More
Taming the Beast – Hip Hop in After-School
I love hip hop music. I love love love the songs on the radio. I love probably the worst of the worst. I love even the songs that treat women like sex objects and I’m a feminist through and through. I just love the sounds and the beats, and the spirit hidden under the layer of words that to me feel like a front, an inheritance of our culture and the roles that are being played out of ignorance and habit. But the truth is, even though I love these songs and sing them out loud in my car, I d...Read More