InPractice: Lessons for and from Practitioners

May 2021

Supporting the Success of Male Students of Color During COVID-19

Erika B. Lewy

The COVID-19 pandemic forced leaders of the Male Student Success Initiative at the Community College of Baltimore County to create an entirely online environment for a formerly hands-on program. This post describes some of the steps the program took to deepen its commitment to supporting and mentoring its students in a virtual context.

MDRC is studying this program in its Men of Color College Achievement (MoCCA) Project, and took note of particular challenges with a required first-year student success course geared toward the experiences of men of color. This blog post examines steps taken by success mentors (program staff members who are men of color as well) to sustain connections between students and support services on campus, while offering leadership and professional development opportunities.

April 2021

Practitioners Led the Way in Change and Adaptation

Dina A. R. Israel, Jennifer Miller Gaubert

The InPractice blog is MDRC’s place for sharing resources and tips developed by practitioners, for practitioners. This review of the past year’s posts shows how our program partners adjusted to difficult, uncertain conditions and continued to deliver services during the worst of the pandemic. These front-line examples may help other agencies and program staff members as they move forward and cope with their own challenges.

August 2020

Conducting Home Visits Without Visiting Homes

Mervett Hefyan

Home visiting programs like Child First are a vital support system for families coping with challenges such as homelessness, poverty, drug abuse, and maternal depression. As the COVID-19 crisis continues, Child First teams have transitioned to telehealth technology to maintain their relationships with families and provide them with much-needed services.

July 2020

The Maritime Odyssey Preschool: Providing Early Childhood Education During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Amena Sengal

Monisha Gibson, director and CEO of the Maritime Odyssey Preschool in Norwalk, Connecticut, discusses the program’s work with its vulnerable student and family population. The coronavirus pandemic has prompted many changes, but Odyssey has taken on new partners to sustain its holistic community approach: prenatal support, food distribution, and connections to mental health services, and quality preschool programming. Odyssey now offers technology support and continues its preschool teacher training for interested members of its community.

July 2020

The Newly Virtual Workplace: Employers and Trainers Adapt

Hannah Dalporto

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced an abrupt shift to virtual educational interactions, which has hit career and technical education programs especially hard. MDRC’s recent (virtual) discussion with representatives of 13 schools, districts, and programs that provide work-based learning found each of them seizing unexpected opportunities amid considerable challenges as they pivot from hands-on experiential learning to virtual instruction and work. These organizations, which offer internships, apprenticeships, job shadowing, career mentoring, and other work-related programs, are adapting to keep serving their students. 

June 2020

Shifting to Remote Service Delivery: Top Five Tips for Practitioners

Donna Wharton-Fields

Here are MDRC’s Top Five Tips for social service and educational programs adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic. These guidelines can help ensure staff members’ and participants’ personal safety so that agencies can continue providing high-quality services and support while working remotely. They also include guidance on protecting participant confidentiality and keeping sensitive personal information secure.

May 2020

Moving Fast and Staying on Target: Lessons from Per Scholas’s Experience with Remote Training

Alissa Stover, Frieda Molina

The loss of almost 40 million jobs in the 10 weeks since the U.S. outbreak of the coronavirus makes demand-driven occupational skills training truly essential. Bridgette Gray, chief impact officer at Per Scholas, a sector-based training and career advancement program, shares tips for retooling to meet the demand for remote services. The organization successfully transitioned 521 students and 200 staff members to a virtual training environment over a single, remarkable week in March 2020.

May 2020

Break the Ice, Build Connections

Mohammed Alkurd

Building connections among staff members can feel especially challenging in a time when remote work and video conference calls make up most of our working day. Icebreaker activities are fun, useful tools that managers, supervisors, training facilitators, and coaches can use to enliven meetings and strengthen team and group bonds. This post highlights some of the icebreaker activities that programs use internally, and some of the ones MDRC’s technical assistance teams use when working with programs. The exercises are separated into ones that work well in short online gatherings and ones that help break up longer sessions.

April 2020

Running Effective Group Meetings While Working Remotely

Samantha Wulfsohn, Zaina Rodney, Rebecca Behrmann

As programs across the country adjust to working and serving clients in the context of COVID-19, many of us are spending considerable chunks of our days on conference calls and group meetings. We’re expanding on our February post that shared ideas on how to organize effective, engaging remote learning communities, with tips for establishing connections between groups that meet virtually for check-ins and training. We’re expanding on that theme with tips to help you run remote group meetings with staff, stakeholders, and participants and stay productive in this uncertain, unsettling time.

February 2020

Connecting Staff and Strengthening Training with Remote Learning Communities

Samantha Wulfsohn, Zaina Rodney, Rebecca Behrmann

One-time training rarely results in long-term shifts in working practices, but remote learning communities can help reinforce new lessons and promote lasting change. Program staff working toward common goals can meet regularly, connecting online and via video and telephone conferencing, and work toward shared learning objectives in a structured virtual environment. Skilled facilitators can act as guides and sounding boards, and ongoing discussions may help staff incorporate new ideas into their work. In this post, we share what we’ve learned about organizing successful remote learning communities through the Building Bridges and Bonds and the Procedural Justice-Informed Alternatives to Con­tempt projects.

About InPractice

MDRC is known for its groundbreaking evaluations and demonstrations of social policies and programs. Our success depends to a great extent on the work of MDRC’s operations staff, field liaisons who partner with service providers to solve everyday problems and create valuable learning exchanges. The InPractice blog series highlights lessons from MDRC’s work with programs, featuring posts on recruiting participants and keeping them engaged, supporting provider teams, using data for program improvement, and providing services remotely.

Our operations staff members, who write most InPractice posts, have firsthand professional experience — including as state and local government administrators, program managers, case workers, teachers, school administrators, and community organizers. They are relationship builders and creative trainers who help programs develop and adopt new ways of working, translate complex research agendas into clear and practical guidance, provide tailored technical assistance, facilitate opportunities to hear multiple perspectives and experiences, and refine fundraising efforts. They strive to understand programs and their participants inside and out. These core aspects of MDRC’s work are bolstered by our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

For more on our collaborative work with nonprofits, see this video, the MDRC Center for Applied Behavioral Science website, and the project description for the Center for Data Insights.

Back to top

Dina Israel Jennifer Miller Gaubert

The editors of InPractice are Dina A. R. Israel, Senior Operations Associate, and Jennifer Miller Gaubert, who manages MDRC’s Institutional Review Board.

About the InPractice Topics

Engage
Keep participants coming back for services

Go Virtual
Provide high-quality remote services and support

Recruit
Find the right people to take part at the right time

Spotlight
Learn from peers

Support Your Team
Create an environment of staff learning, collaboration, and growth

Use Data
Use data to inform program operations, improvements, performance, and evaluation