“There’s got to be a different way to do this”: Need In Deed

The Need In Deed that Ena Rosen knew 17 years ago looked and felt a lot different than it does today.

The service-learning nonprofit has always held to the same goal: Encourage students to become engaged Philadelphians connected to their communities by asking them what real-world problems they themselves are interested in, then adapting curriculum to revolve around those topics.

The way the organization reaches that goal has changed, though.

Until 2004, Need In Deed’s staff of four was working across a range of grade levels within independent, parochial, charter and public schools, guiding in-class projects themselves. But at most, they were only reaching 350 students in any given year.

“Given the number of hours in the day and the way school schedules work, we realized we were always going to be very limited in the number of kids we were going to be able to reach,” said Rosen, associate director at the nonprofit. “Many times, the teacher would remove themselves from this process and the Need In Deed staff person would work directly with the students.”

Rosen said around this time, the nonprofit started getting nailed with some pretty big-picture questions from funders. Why should they continue to fund a nonprofit with such limited scalability? Is the program even sustainable? All reasonable questions, but Need In Deed didn’t have an immediate answer.

They were still figuring things out.

“We started thinking, ‘There’s got to be a different way to do this,'” Rosen said. “One that will create more of a legacy after we leave a classroom and also a way for us to increase the number of students we were going to reach.”

It’s how Need In Deed came to develop its teachers network.

Instead of going to the classrooms and engaging with the students themselves, they began building a process that would train teachers in the service-learning strategy Need In Deed staffers had brought to classrooms for decades. The framework would provide support for teachers and give them access to a diverse spread of community resources.

“In a system that can be volatile, wherever a teacher goes, those skills go with that teacher,” said Executive Director Kimberly Kirn. “If a classroom is the unit of change in a school system, you’ve got somebody who is better prepared to respond.”

The shift to the teachers network in 2004 was a game changer for the nonprofit, but the transition wasn’t exactly smooth. Sustainability was an immediate issue. When the network was just a few years old, said Associate Program Director Pam Prell, there was a hope that teachers would be in the network for a couple of years, then go off on their own and do the work — educational missionaries, of sorts.

That didn’t exactly pan out.

“We’ve learned that teachers are a diverse group of folks with a variety of needs,” Prell said. “Some of them still need a very close connection to a staff member to help them make the connections to community resources.”

The network also evolved fairly quickly from school principals recommending teachers to a self-selecting process. Why? Because Need In Deed has found that the teachers need to want it — just like any other professional in any other professional development program.

But not all teachers are prepared for open classrooms where students can speak from such emotional depths. These students are talking about problems they’re most familiar with — and that’s not always an easy thing to deal with in public schools like Philly’s.

“There have been times when students have gone somewhere where the teachers have been unprepared. We’ve been caught unaware of what the emotional response was to something then scrambling to find those resources for the students and the teachers where necessary,” Rosen said. “We’ve seen a lot more now. That was something that caught us by surprise.”

It’s dangerous work, Kirn said. The application process has to have rigor.

“Whatever a student says, you need to come at it from a place of empathy,” she said. “To shut it down is harmful. To judge it is harmful. There is research that says doing this work poorly is worse than not doing it at all.”

For Need In Deed, the teacher network is still a work in progress. But for all the pitfalls and speed bumps, the staff at Need In Deed does not hesitate to acknowledge them. They, like many in the nonprofit world might learn to do, understand how much there is to gain from shedding hubris and admitting when an initiative falls short of expectations.