An Unexpected Leap to Virtual Programs with Sarah Walzer

“If you had asked me in January of 2020, ‘Could this model that’s all about relationship building between staff and parents and between parents and children. Could this be done a hundred percent virtually? I would have told you no way.”

Sarah Walzer:

I am Sarah Walzer. I am the CEO of ParentChild+, which is a national early childhood family support nonprofit, and it works in 16 states in 6 countries.

Julie Lacouture:

Sarah, I’m so glad to have you here. I saw a great article about you in the Chronicle of Philanthropy about some pivots you made during this last year. So we’ll get to that, but I’m excited to have you on to hear about all the things you have to share about that learning experience.

Sarah Walzer:

Thank you. It has been quite now we have to say more than a year, right? Quite a 15 months.

Julie Lacouture:

So our first question always for everyone is what makes your team run well?

Sarah Walzer:

The number one thing that makes our team run well is that we have always really tried to live our name. So we are ParentChild+. We are all about supporting parents and children and families, and we make that a reality internally in the organization. And it becomes not about just supporting families because not everybody on our team has a family at the moment, but about the flexibility to make sure that people have the time and the space and the mind space to really dig into the work, but also to really live their lives and support their other passions, whether those are their children or going back to school or entering politics. All of those things happened on our team. But I think what makes the team so rich and vibrant, which is nobody feels like they’re either shutting out the other parts of their life when they come to work, but they also know that they’re going to have the space to live those parts of their lives. And we think that enriches everything they do.

Sarah Walzer:

I was about to say during the day at work, except I think one of the other things that’s part of being flexible and working in concert with the other parts of people’s lives is that we don’t expect that the work necessarily gets done every day from nine to five, because you might have something else really important you need to do at some point between nine and five. And I think that flexibility, both that sort of time-space flexibility and that flexibility to make sure were enabling people to engage the other parts of their lives and really [inaudible 00:08:23] our work with that is critical.

Julie Lacouture:

So let’s talk about the scope of your program.

Sarah Walzer:

We are one of those standard things in the nonprofit world, which is that we have this very lean national center staff that oversees and supports the work that’s happening around the country. That team is 16 people in our… Nobody’s in the office anymore, but in the New York area and six state directors who work in six states across the country. But they support a network of local partner agencies who are implementing our program across the country, and that network is currently 142 agencies around the country staffed by that 280 site coordinators. Those are the professionals folks who oversee the program in each of their communities and about 900 what we call early learning specialists who are the heart and soul of the program. They are the people who are going into the homes of over 9,000 families and family childcare providers in these 16 states and implementing the program, working with parents to prepare their children for school success through twice weekly home visits. So small national staff, bigger state and local staff and hundreds and thousands of home visits happening every year.

Julie Lacouture:

So you said two things, but in the last couple of minutes. So one is that you value putting family first. And one of the things you think makes your organization run well is that your staff has what sounds to me like agency to do their best work when they choose to. The other thing is that you’re geographically spread out. And so I know there’s a lot of managers out there who might be thinking, “Well, how do you make sure the work gets done? How do you make sure the work is done with high quality?”

Sarah Walzer:

The key thing, it’s quality and fidelity to the model because we are an evidence-based program. And what we promise funders, both public and private, is that they will get these outcomes if they fund the program in their community every year, because each of our partner agencies is implementing the model with fidelity. So again, it happens through a variety of layers and a lot of communication. So we are a turnkey training model, the national center staff train these site coordinators across the country to implement the model. And as part of that training to train and support their local early learning specialists. And we do that not just through this turnkey training, but through a lot of resources. So we have a very robust learning management system, which enables site staff from across the country to log in and learn more about every aspect of the program, whether it’s selecting books and materials that are representative of the families they are working with in their communities, to entering data in our web-based data system. All of that content is available for everyone to access on that system.

Sarah Walzer:

We also do a lot of small group conversations. So the site coordinators in each state meet regularly with their state director. The site coordinators in states that don’t yet have state directors meet regularly with a national center staff person. And then, then again, that trickles down. Each site coordinator meets every week with the early learning specialists that they support. And the national center, so I guess it trickles up to the national center staff every other week with all of the state directors. So that sort of feedback loop that’s starting with the folks on the front line and making sure it makes it across to the folks in the national center, and then vice verse, that any changes, new ideas, new materials we want sites to try are making their way from the national center out into the field.

Julie Lacouture:

I think what’s interesting about what you just said is you’re talking about a national team, and you always hear this from national teams, is communication is important, but sometimes to a national team, communication can mean, “We will give you announcements and you will receive our communication.” But what you are saying, I think, is that communication to you is not only frequent from you, transparent from you, accessible to everyone all the time, and to-

Sarah Walzer:

Right. That is absolutely critical, particularly because we have this small national team that’s trying to do a whole lot of things to support all this work around the country. And the only way for us to do it in a way that’s actually supportive is to get that regular, not just feedback on what we’re doing, innovation from the field. And I think there was nothing that highlighted that as the last year and a half.

Julie Lacouture:

Let’s talk about adapting to changing environments, because I think we’ve experienced with one or two of those in the last 18 months. What was March 2020 like for you? There was a quote from you saying you were resistant to doing virtual visits before, and then I think your hand got forced in March. Is that about right? So take us back.

Sarah Walzer:

Absolutely accurate. And in fact, our research director says all the time now, if you had asked me even in January of 2020 could this model, this evidence-based model, that’s all about relationship building between staff and parents and between parents and children, could this be done a hundred percent virtually, I would have told you no way. We can’t build those kinds of relationships. We didn’t even think it was worth testing at that point. And then yes, in mid-March of 2020, our hand got completely forced. It was such an interesting forcing, right? Because we did think it was temporary at the time, right? We all thought, “Okay, maybe this is two months. Certainly by the summer, we’ll be back to normal,” whatever we thought that was at that time. And we thought that both about our own work as a team and about the actual work of our program.

Sarah Walzer:

The one key thing we knew was that we did not want to lose touch with the families that we were in the midst of working with, and that as we were all living in as well, this was incredibly stressful. And that would be the absolute worst time to stop supporting families and particularly families with young children who were not getting any other kinds of support there. So we knew we couldn’t stop, but we did really think it was temporary. So in fact, when we did that initial pivot, it was okay, you’re going to stay in touch with families. And if that family has a cell phone or a tablet and the wifi or internet access such that you can do a virtual visit, whether it’s FaceTime or WhatsApp or Zoom, you should do that. But if they don’t, you can stay in touch by phone because we’re only doing this for a month or two, and you’ll continue that relationship. And then we’ll make up the visits with them as soon as we can get back to being in person.

Sarah Walzer:

We didn’t have guidance on that yet. We had some ideas, but what we immediately started to get from site staff was okay, we’ve tried this. This worked or didn’t work. And we’ve tried that, and this is working really well. And then they started to record those virtual visits for us and send them to us and say, “Look at this. This is something that’s really worked. See how engaged the child is. See what a good conversation I’m having with the parents.”

Julie Lacouture:

So it sounds like the first step was you let the caseworker who’s in touch with that family make the call about the best medium to reach that family.

Sarah Walzer:

Absolutely. And the other thing that happened is, so we are a program that every week we bring a gift of a book or a toy to the families we’re working with and that’s the curricular item for the week and it’s how we model reading conversation and play and support the parents in building those school-readiness skills. People got locked out of their offices. The staff, they didn’t have access to those books. And so the other thing was supporting them on, you know what, you’ve already brought books and toys into the home. You can have the family bring those out. They can use them again. Really what you need to be is there for support and a lot of what you need to be there for is information sharing.

Sarah Walzer:

So as information about COVID started to roll out, it was supporting families on what was safe, on what the risks were, on how to protect themselves. It was helping them figure out where to get masks. It became a whole lot of other things that superseded those books and toys. Parents started to lose their jobs because they worked in service industries that were shut down. They didn’t have access to food. They were starting to worry about being evicted if they couldn’t pay their rent. There were incredible diaper and formula shortages around the country. So very quickly though, for many of our field staff turned to, how are we just going to help families get through these months?

Julie Lacouture:

That was March, where it was like anybody used anything. Did you coalesce as an organization around a particular technology and style that worked to build the relationships in the same way that you could have pre-pandemic?

Sarah Walzer:

So what we call less around was that sort of gold star way of doing this was video visits. We pretty quickly also realize, “And a video visit on a tablet is better than a video visit on a phone, but at the very least, let’s get people stands for their phones so that the parent and child are sitting in front of it and not worried about holding it.” And so lots of little things like that. We’re focused on getting the best communication between the family and the early learning specialists. Anything you can do to keep those two visits a week, those two points of contact with the family, is critical in particular, because as you pointed out, things were changing so rapidly that you wanted to stay up with both what was going on with them, but also your ability to support and keeping them up with what was happening in the world.

Sarah Walzer:

Getting families materials also became I think a clear focal point for the staff. And it was more about parents really starting to stress about how to keep that two and three year old active, engaged, feeling some sense of social, emotional wellbeing and balance. And the materials were really helpful for doing that. And then they started to see that they worked, and the parents were reporting, or if they were all witnessing on the video, changes in the child, the parents were feeling supported and also like they were able to support their child. And that was what we wanted to see happen.

Julie Lacouture:

That’s amazing. I know with technology rollouts, we sometimes don’t get everybody to adopt right away. So I would imagine you had some families you had to track down or work harder with. Did you lose anybody?

Sarah Walzer:

So really interesting and the first part of the answer gets back to our earlier discussion about the two-way communication. So we did early, I guess we did in May a survey of the field, surveying families and staff about technology. And what we found was pretty consistent with the national data, which was that 20-30% of our families were challenged by lack of internet access, access to wifi and devices that worked and that could be connected to the internet. That was obviously important data, useful for going out to funders and saying, “There’s this gap here, and this is a lot of families, and we need dollars to buy devices.” It may be that someone has a smartphone, but they have no data plan and there is no wifi where they live. So whether it was buying hotspots or getting a data plan to really get funders to support with dollars for that, but also to get existing funders to support sites in reallocating budget dollars. So we’re no longer driving to every family twice a week for a visit. Let’s reallocate all those dollars to technology.

Sarah Walzer:

So that was part one. I think part two though was there were some families who just were not comfortable with the technology. Families were doubled and tripled up, particularly as the economic ripple effects of the pandemic move through communities. They didn’t want anybody to see the surroundings they were living in. We said then and we have continued to say that there will always be some families for whom a phone visit is their choice, and we’re never going to deny a family access to the program because of that. The other piece though was we had site staff for whom this technology was all new and who were not so comfortable with any of this technology. And that was really where trainings starting just to do staff meetings by Zoom and meetings with folks from the field on Zoom. So people started to get comfortable with the technology and using it.

Sarah Walzer:

Getting staff quality tech. I mean, the other thing that happened was we had a lot of our sites staff are parents. They were home. They had kids doing remote school at home. They did not have the bandwidth to be doing video visits with families while their kids were doing remote school. So it was really important also to make sure that at every site, folks were thinking about those issues. What does your staff need in order to do this comfortably? Just as I said, we pretty quickly realized if we could get families tablets, that was better than doing a visit on your phone. If we could get site staff laptops, that was better than doing all your work on a tablet.

Julie Lacouture:

Sarah, you’ve led this organization for a while, and I’m hoping you could share, because it was always reassuring for me to hear, a mistake you’ve made and what you’ve learned from it.

Sarah Walzer:

I’ve made lots of mistakes, but there are two that I think that pandemic really highlighted for me. And so the first one, that one that I think I had been making for a long time was this notion that a national team, a national board needed to all be basically in the same place. We’re based outside of New York, our offices on Long Island. And frankly, for years, we have had challenges around hiring because New York City and Long Island are very expensive places to live, and we’re a nonprofit, but also because even for people who live in New York City or in the Greater New York area, commuting out to Long Island on a daily basis, which is what in my ignorance used to think people needed to do with the idea that that was important to be in the office in order to interact with the other folks on your team and do all that brainstorming and idea-sharing and also see projects through the end that required some kind of regular touch point in an office.

Sarah Walzer:

I had started to learn it because we have these amazing state directors who are around the country and they were doing amazing work, but also that our folks in New York were able to work with them very well, even though they were in different places, but the pandemic has really highlighted that. And it’s changed our thinking about hiring. It’s incredibly freeing because it enables you to think I could hire somebody anywhere in the country. So that was definitely a mistake for a long time. I think it’s been a mistake on the board as well. We did have board members who were outside of New York, but they were few and we always worried about the ability to engage with them as well as with the board members who were in New York. We’ve now held six, seven board meetings virtually. We’ve gotten incredible attendance because it’s much easier for folks to attend a virtual meeting.

Sarah Walzer:

Really good engagement, I think everybody’s been really excited about what that interaction is like, and it pushed us to think, “Okay, how are we going to engage folks, particularly new board members who are coming on, in our work when we can’t bring them to a site or bring site staff to in-person to a meeting?” So we’ve brought state directors. We’ve brought site staff virtually to board meet, to talk with board members, and I think that’s been great and really rich. So I think that’s my big organizational mistake. I think the small mistake we made at the start of the pandemic is there is such a thing as too much communication and too many meetings, and-

Julie Lacouture:

Okay. Now there’s too many meetings. I know that one. Tell me what you mean by too much communication.

Sarah Walzer:

So when we first went into virtual mode, we were sending our site staff across the country these e-blasts every week, and they got longer and longer as we like put more and more things in that. And then we started to hear from our state directors, people aren’t reading those anymore. They’re too long. They come too frequently and you’re losing the impact of the content. So every other week, shortening them, developing some specialized ones. So we send now one once a month that’s just on our data system, updates on it, glitches, fixes of glitches, reporting. So people know that’s where to go for that information. And if that’s their part of the program, they don’t have to read the other stuff that comes back. And then we also did, and this worked for some folks and not for others, but we also started putting all of that information that would have been in those weekly things up on Slack.

Julie Lacouture:

So Sarah, what’s your number one tip for someone in your position?

Sarah Walzer:

I think we’ve sort of touched on it in a couple of the answers, is it’s going back to that really being flexible about, as I just alluded to, where your workforce lives, I mean really being flexible about who you can hire and where they are based and judging that based on their ability to do the work. But I think the really important thing about how you operate an office, people come to nonprofit work because they’re passionate about the work that the particular organization they’re working for is doing. But we also know that it’s not the best paid work and that it is stressful and challenging. And the way to keep good people is to be flexible, and to create an environment where people always know that they will pick up the slack for somebody if they need to flex out for a moment because something else is going on in their lives and somebody else is going to do the same for them. So flexibility, adaptability, that, for me, has been the piece that’s kept me going, but I think also is the reason why we’ve retained staff for a long, long time. It’s kind of longer than the traditional trajectory in the nonprofit sector.

Julie Lacouture:

That’s great to hear. I think something that I’m hearing from you also about is that in that flexibility also is a real laser focus on what your purpose is. You can be flexible because you know where you need to land.

Sarah Walzer:

Yes. I think that’s absolutely right. And I think that you can’t be flexible without that, right? The flexibility works because everybody knows where they’re headed and where the organization wants to be headed, but also where their particular work is headed. And then that gets us back to the fact, and if they do their best work in pointing us in that direction at hours when I’m asleep, that’s fine, as long as we’re all calling in the same direction and getting the work done that needs to be done.

Julie Lacouture:

So Sarah, you’re 24-hours-a-day nationwide organization because you’re flexible and you’re doing virtual visits. I would imagine that’s increased your capacity for the number of families you could serve. But you tell me what’s the big idea moving forward from where you are right now.

Sarah Walzer:

Well, you hit on the big idea. The big idea is virtual and hybrid, however that emerges, provides us in this opportunity to reach so many more families in more places, but warfare was in the communities in which we’re already in. Part of what’s driving our thinking about what comes next, whenever next is, was that we all started to hear from sites that there were families they had not been able to get to enroll pre-pandemic and families they were struggling to retain pre-pandemic, families who were having difficulty making the two visits a week, who once they could do this virtually were there for every visit, couldn’t wait to enroll in the program, were really enthusiastic. And those families, many of them have now successfully completed the program, making every visit, but came out of the learning that, “Oh, this actually could work virtually.” But then that there were families we were just missing because we weren’t offering this as an alternative method of participating in the program.

Sarah Walzer:

And part of what we’re doing now is, with an outside evaluator, really trying to dig into the question of what about virtual visits worked for families? What about it worked for staff? But even more importantly, who were the families it worked so well for and why? And how do we make sure that we are offering multiple ways for families to engage with the program? Because the ultimate goal is to give as many parents as possible support in getting their children ready to have a successful school. And one of the really exciting things for us is so we currently work in 40 different languages across the country, but we’re only able in any given community to support families in the language that we’ve been able to hire staff in that community. But this may mean that the Bengali family in Madison, Wisconsin can get a visit from a Bengali home visitor in San Jose, California, because they can do it virtually.

Sarah Walzer:

That opens a whole world. It also means that families we work with who are migrant workers can stay with the home visitor in whatever community they first began home visits as they move to other communities, because they’re going to be able to continue with that person virtually. And we know the value of that relationship, and now we know that that relationship can happen, but we still are able to prioritize that that relationship happens best when it’s a person who shares a linguistic or cultural background with you, when it’s a person who you have known, whether it’s the person that you started your visits with, you’re going to get to finish your visits with them. All of those other things that we knew were important about relationship building, we now realize we can do virtually and it opens, I think, lots of room for expansion. And you are right, that an early learning specialist can visit more families, if they’re visiting them virtually because they are not driving from place to place. We’re now going to be able to do some of that work virtually, and that’s going to extend our reach. And that is incredibly exciting.

Julie Lacouture:

That is so exciting, and I cannot wait to see which other doors open for you and which ones you walk through. So thank you so much for being here. It was a real joy to talk to you.

Sarah Walzer:

Thank you, Julie. This was wonderful.