 Good afternoon and welcome to On the Waterfront. I'm your host, Melinda Molten, and today we are going to be talking to Christine Lloyd Newbury, who is the new executive director for the Sarah Holbrook Center. Christine, welcome to my show. Thank you so much, Melinda. I'm really excited to be here. All right, I'm going to put it on speaker view so, and then so the people can look at you and not at me, but I guess the first thing I want to ask you, and I'm so glad that you're going to that you're willing to speak with me, is what got you into this work? Tell us a little bit about what drew you to this work? Who was your mentor? Was there somebody in your family who inspired you to get into service industry to help others? Talk a little bit about your growing up and what got you, and what inspired you to get into this work. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I can tell you the exact moment I decided what I wanted to do, and I was nine years old, and I grew up in a fairly chaotic household in life, and somebody showed up in my life in the midst of a crisis and gave me a sense of safety and calm at a point where most of the adults in my life were unable to do that because of their own own issues, and it really was from that point. I didn't know what to call it. I wouldn't have said I wouldn't have understood that it was social work, but that really was what it was, and and I never really wavered for that from that. I never thought I wanted to be a nurse or a teacher or or anything else. This was the thing that I was going to do, and what it's provided me since then. You know, I have a bachelor's in social work and a master's in public administration has been the opportunity to show up for people on both their best and their worst days and to bear witness to that, but also to provide support and watch people grow and become better versions of themselves, right? I mean, I think that's what we're all striving for in our life, is to continue to be a better version of who we are. And so, you know, that's how I got here. The scope of my career has been everything from, you know, child protective services as a crisis case manager, working with kids both in the system and foster care and through the court system and all that goes with that, working with adults with multiple sclerosis, working with adolescents on substance use prevention, but all of it really is about meeting people where they are in their own vulnerability, whatever that looks like and sort of being a constant for them in that. And that's sort of what I look for. That's wonderful. Now, were you reborn in Vermont? Are you a Vermonter or did you did you end up coming up here for some reason? No, I moved to my family moved to Vermont when I was 10 years old. So I started high school or what with that point was junior high down in southern Vermont went to Leland and Gray Union High School down in Townsend and graduated from there and went on to the University of Vermont and left for a few years after that. And when my son was about two and a half, we decided that we wanted to come back to Vermont. This was where we wanted to raise him and and that's what we've done. We've been in Colchester for the majority of that time since returning. Well, it certainly is a wonderful place to be, don't you think, and a great place to raise children. So I'm so glad we made that decision. Yeah, really. So you were, I see that you were, you have 20 years of experience in Health and Human Services leadership and program management. You all prior to joining Sarah Holbrook, you were the director of connecting youth in Champlain Valley School District for 10 years, leading a team focused on positive youth development programming, substance abuse prevention service and parent education for youth and families grades K to 12. And this is the job that you had before you came to Sarah Holbrook. Yes, that was the job. That was the job that I left one day and came here the next. And that was I was there for a really long time and that was a wonderful position that that transitioned over time. But this was a this has been a wonderful next step, both in my career and also in I think what I bring to this organization. Well, I'm so excited to hear what your vision is for Sarah Holbrook because this organization has been for around for a long time. Can you tell us a little bit who Sarah Holbrook is and a little bit of history about the organization? Yeah, sure. Sarah Holbrook was a psychology professor at the University of Vermont. She was also an incredible advocate for children and families and brought a model of family support to the area that was happening in some of the bigger cities, but hadn't made its way, you know, more nationwide at that point. And that was 1937 when this organization was founded. So we've, we are the oldest organization of our type in the area. And we have been functioning continuously during that time. And her vision really was to create a welcoming space for families who are often disenfranchised from their local community or schools. And at that point, it was French Canadian and Irish immigrants who were coming into the country and, you know, much like we do now, there were language classes, there was childcare, there was food support, you know, it's a lot of the same stuff. And who walks through our door looks different. But the services we provide are still incredibly necessary. You know, it's amazing, we've expanded as an organization the shares we moved back into this newly renovated and expanded building. And so our capacity has grown even in spite of COVID. And we're still maxing out our programs, which is incredible when you think about how much if we're maxing out our programs, how much people need it. And so that that need hasn't changed. And, you know, all of the directors who came after Sarah have really continued that legacy of why we are here as an organization ultimately at the end of the day. And it's interesting. It's interesting. It's an interesting conversation when we talk about how we've served new Americans and the number of new Americans over the last few years has really shrunk. And I expect that that will probably change with the new administration. And still, we've constantly we're registering new kids on a weekly basis to our programs. So, so is so for my viewers who may not know about the Sarah Holbrooke Center, tell us a little bit about what what Sarah Holbrooke does. Is it primarily for new Americans? Who are who are the children that you serve? And how and how do you serve the community and the capacity that you that you do? And then a little bit about your vision for the next few years that you see for the organization. Wonderful. Yeah. So we serve we're here for all kids. I think there has been a time when particularly when the organization was smaller that we really limited that to new Americans and families who couldn't otherwise access enriching child care for their for their young ones. But we serve students 18 months old all the way up through high school graduation. So we have programs that at every step of the way are youngest. You know, our littlest citizens in our programs are our toddler and pre K. And that's a Head Start collaborative program. So we work very closely with we collaborate with Head Start on that program. And so it's a shared with some of their staff, some of our staff. But we follow all of the federal Head Start regulations for that program. And then we transition kids. So I just have a question, Christine. So is that it? But is it like a daycare center? Is that the services that is our so it's a day? It's so the parents would drop the children off at the center. And their children would get would be in an enrichment program for the day. Exactly. So our toddler program is straight up an enrichment program. And we provide universal pre K through our pre K program. So that's a combination of sort of state regulations and federal regulations. How many as it pertains to that many students are in that program in our pre K. We max out at about 15 students. And in our toddler program, we max out right now, we're at about four to five, but we can max out at about eight once COVID restrictions are fully lifted in those programs. And those are specifically for students who are coming from lower income families. There is an income qualification for a Head Start to be part of a Head Start program. But it really is about giving those giving our littles the most solid start we can to getting them excited about education and helping the families to absolutely. I mean, one of the things that we know and research shows over and over again is that adequate, reliable and enriching child care allows families to maintain income, maintain housing, all of those really, really important things. You know, it's not a nice extra to have. And we've seen a lot of challenges for families during COVID where at points where we've had to close down because of positive test results and quarantine and all of those kinds of things. And the challenge that that has posed to all of our families, regardless of income level, you know, not having child care one week is not viable for the majority of families. So what are you doing during COVID? We have been going strong. We closed, you know, incidentally, I started the beginning of March last year and two weeks later, everything shut down. We went fully remote. But we opened our programs back up in June and we ran a summer program, lower numbers, of course, but I think we hit the families that really, really, really needed it. And then we started the school year full steam ahead. And so we've been doing this now since June, supporting families. We were named one of the first COVID related child care remote learning hubs in the area, which meant that we opened our doors for extended hours during on days when students were remote learning, right? So at the beginning, that was all week long, we took students full day in our elementary program all week and where typically we would just have our afternoon programming or after school program. And currently now it's on Wednesday. So we continue to be open a full day on Wednesday to support parents and with whatever the next iteration of that that comes after vacation, because we know there is a change coming, we're just not sure exactly what it's going to be yet. We will continue to sort of dovetail with whatever school is doing to provide that extra support to families. Great. Well, let's go back and talk about the program. So we got through the talk. Let's go back to the youngest got the youngest. Yep. And so that when they when our kids transition into kindergarten, for those who are in the immediate area, they can participate in our after school program that happens here at 66 North Ave. And students get bused here from their school and dropped off and are here for depending on what time their bus arrived somewhere between usually 233 until 530 participating in an enriching after school program. And that includes, you know, homework time and snack, and then lots of opportunity to just sort of blow off steam from the day. And again, a safe, comfortable, bright enriching environment. You know, I'm excited for people to be able to come into the building. We haven't been able to open the doors in the way that we would have liked to when when we moved back into this building in August, but soon enough, it did an expansion, a dramatic expansion. We are close to tripled the amount of space that physical space that we have in the building and we probably somewhere four to five times the amount of program space in the building, which is absolutely insane. So how many how many does I'm going to call them students? How many students do you serve in total? In total, probably on order of just about 400 students total across all of our programs, which is amazing. Our elementary program max is out at about 59. And then we have a huge number of students through our middle and high school programs who participate because we manage Hunt Middle School's after school program. And that has a significant number of students who come through it. So you've been around since the mid 1930s, before the Second World War. Yeah. How do you support your services? How do you what, you know, what's the fun creatively? I'm sure you do. Because I want to reach out to my viewers and make sure that they know that they can donate to the Sarah Holbrook Center. Absolutely. At any time by going to your website, which is Sarah Holbrook with Sarah Holbrook. Is it CC? CC. Yep. So Sarah Holbrook CC.org. And it's A-R-A-H-O-L-B-R-O-O-K and then CC.org. And anyone who's watching the show who wants to make a donation to support these incredible programs that serve over 450 students in the Burlington area, please go to that website and make a donation. No donation is too small. Absolutely. It all adds up. And we are nothing without our individual supporters. They make up the bulk of our budget, which is an amazing testament to the work that we do and the support that we have in the larger community. And certainly this big new beautiful building is a testament to that. For sure. So I want you all to share with folks about your food pantry. I understand you have a food pantry. Why don't you share with our food? We do. Yeah. So we, and that has also, as we moved into this building, expanded pretty dramatically. It's not specific to families that we serve or who have any other relationship with us. It's available to anybody who needs it. We invite families or individuals to come to the Center once a month to receive you know, probably on par with a week's worth of food. We try to be as generous as we can. And all you have to do is give a call to Donna. You call our main number, 862-6342, and she will do some shopping in our food pantry for you based on what you let her know you need. And we've recently expanded that to include a small amount of perishables, which we have not had before in the past. And so we do have, we do now carry some frozen proteins for people and fruits and vegetables that we have not been able to do before. And so that's an exciting transition as well. So can people donate to your pantry? Absolutely. We take both money and food donations to the food pantry, and that can be arranged through Donna as well. We do have a partnership with the food bank that for when people donate money allows us to increase what our purchasing power of that money. So we can purchase things at a much lower cost through the food bank than we would be able to say go to the grocery store and purchase. So if somebody wants to drop off food or non-perishable for the Sarah Holbrook Center, how would they go about doing that? Donna won't be happy with me saying this, but really you can come any time with a donation. There's always somebody here, but it's always best to give us a call in advance just to make sure that that we know you're coming and you're not going to have to wait to drop off a donation, and we definitely want to be able to see you when you do that and say thank you. Absolutely. Well, let's give it, let's give folks your phone number again. Sure. So it's 8-6-2-6-3-4-2 and you can chat with anybody who answers the phone, but Donna is the person who oversees our food pantry. And you can also visit the website at Sarah Holbrook CC, Sarah-S-A-R-A-H-O-L-B-R-O-K-C-C dot org, and I'm sure that folks can reach out to you through your website. Absolutely. And I encourage anybody and everybody to make a donation. Nothing's too small for this credible organization. Anna, my viewers out there, I want to talk about how they can get involved with Sarah Holbrook. Yeah, absolutely. We've learned about the children's programs, and so if they feel that their child might qualify to be part of the program, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you to see if that's possible? Sure. Simply give us a call. Simply give us a call. Any of our program directors are always happy to chat with prospective families who are interested in coming into our programs, and that goes for all of our programs all the way up through our teenagers and our youth adventure program and our teen drop-in center, all of it. Give us a call. Check us out on the website. You can email staff directly from the website, and so you can find the particular director that you're looking for, but we have directors over our early elementary program, our elementary program, our middle school, and our teen program, and so they're all very, very welcoming, wonderful individuals who are happy to walk people through that process. Wonderful. How big is your staff? We have a staff. When I started Melinda, we had nine staff. We currently have 31 staff in the organization. A year ago when you started, there were nine. Yeah. The expansion that we've gone through is absolutely insane and wonderful. How do you explain that? What's that? How do you explain this expansion in a year? Well, it's a space thing. Well, it's two things. One, it's space. We didn't used to be able to run our preschool and our elementary program simultaneously because we had one program room that had to be shared, and you can't have elementary students and preschoolers in the same room. Now we have an elementary wing that's three giant classrooms, and so that's what blew the doors off of everything, and we had to add quite a few staff, and then when we went full day for our elementary program, you imagine typically we were a three and a half hour staffing in the afternoon for our elementary program, and to take that and to have it run from 8.30 in the morning until 4.30 in the afternoon, we needed significantly more staff to make that possible. And so we did it. And here we are. Amazing. I'm so proud of you. It has been, I mean, I won't lie, there have been growing pains, but it is such an amazing thing. And when we were finally able to open this building up and have students in here, there's nothing like the sound of kids running through the hallway and the peels of laughter and all of that. It's all, all of the growing pains are completely worth it. I'm so glad, Christine. I want to talk about another way that my viewers can get involved is you can, you can become a volunteer for Sarah Holbrook. Now, I know you're not taking volunteers during COVID, but why don't you talk a little bit about the volunteer program, should any of our viewers want to get involved? There are so many ways when, when the restrictions are lifted, there are so many ways that people volunteer for this organization. And, you know, it may be a one off project and about to give somebody a call to come do some volunteer work, organizing closets, because we need to do some storage reorganizing. But also, we have a lot of people who have in the past volunteered specifically in our program. So whatever the age group, you know, we may, it may be anything from looking for people to help instruct golf lessons, do golf lessons for students in our teen programs, or go skiing with them all the way to coming in and reading to our youngest students. We have a number of people who have volunteered in the past, who have specific skills, their artists, their authors, their dancers, and they share their love of whatever their thing is with students. And, you know, it's all about giving kids an opportunity to see possibility. And so we welcome when the community wants to share the possibilities that they've found in their lives with students. So there's a whole host of ways. And like every organization, there are things, you know, it might be data entry, it might be filing, you know, I mean, there's always always something if working directly with kids isn't your thing, but you are an amazing IT person. Oh my gosh, can I tell you, we could use some IT support. So, well, there you have it. That's that's great. Well, so right, so there's the last thing we want to do is put a volunteer in a box. Right. And, you know, volunteers show up on our door and it's they get to feel good about themselves. And then we also get to benefit from them being here. And I think it's a great, it's a great relationship for an organization to get to have. So for my viewers out there, if anybody's interested in volunteering for the Sarah Holbrook Center, you can call them at 862-6342, area code 802. That's fabulous. Now, another way to get involved is as a donor. And I already told folks that they can go online to Sarah Holbrook, cc.org and make a donation. You can make a donation of food or money to the food pantry. And let's talk a little bit about event participants. Yeah, so we, you can imagine as we've grown the building and grown our census, we also grew our budget pretty substantially. And we do, we will have a number of events coming up. We currently are running a readathon, a big community readathon to raise money for the organization. And so when those things come up, we encourage community to get involved in them. And so right now, you can go to our website, you can see the, you can log in and become a participant in the readathon, commit to reading a certain number of books or listening to a certain number of books or any other way you want to engage with books and invite other people to support your efforts to support Sarah Holbrook Community Center. So read 2021 for Sarah Holbrook and you can find that link on our website as well. So Christine, talk a little bit about your vision because now you've been there for here. And I mean, Lisa was there for so long. Lisa Pollander was there for a really long time. I don't know how many years she was there, but now you're there. You have the new center. It's expanded. You have these new programs. You've tripled your staff. Where do you see Sarah Holbrook going in the next three to five years under your leadership? Yeah, I, you know, we are in a place, I think, finally, where we're moving out of that sort of grassroots functional style into a much more sustainable long-term organization. Hopefully, you know, we have marketing and development in place. We have some of these, the things that allow an organization to be sustainable. It's never going to be easy. There's not a nonprofit out there that will tell you it's easy to maintain an organization, but we are in a place where it is a little bit more sustainable than maybe it's been in the past. And I would say one thing that I, my vision for this is when wherever a family or a student comes into Sarah Holbrook, whether it's through our toddler program or any of our other programs that they know that for the duration, our best interest is what's in the best interest of their student, and that we're always focused on that. And we want to be that place where kids can show up. And, you know, over during COVID, there were some scenarios where, you know, kids said, this was the highlight of my day, and we're on a screen with kids. And there are programs that we started during the shutdown that are still happening virtually, not because they have to, but because kids found a place where they could just be themselves and to show up how they are and that everybody's welcome here. It's not about income, it's not about race or ethnicity, that this is a place where people can find home and community. And so that's really my vision, that wherever a student comes in, the family knows that they can stay with us through graduation and maybe someday potentially beyond. You know, looking at how do we support young adults as they transition from high school into young adulthood and whatever that looks like for them. And particularly, I would say, take that a step further, as I think about our teens and our teen programs, we do an amazing job by our littles, especially with our partnership with Head Start. And I think about our teens and possibility and hope and being successful as adults and helping teens, again, like I said, see possibility. So whether that's visits to colleges or learning about different trades and experiencing things that they might not otherwise be able to experience because of whatever the family situation is, every kid deserves that. And again, it's not about income, it's just every kid deserves a chance to be successful. And that's what we want. What a great vision. Well, Christine Lloyd Newbury, I am so glad to meet you and to have you at the helm of this incredible organization. It's been around since the mid 1930s. And so thank you. Thank you for your service to my viewers. Thank you for joining us and stay in touch with the Sarah Holbrook Center at their website, saraholbrookcc.org, or give them a call at 862-6342, if you want to get involved. And to you, Christine, thank you. Thank you for your incredible service and for taking care of these remarkable families and these students. Really, you're doing Angel's work. So thank you for that. To my viewers, thank you for letting me talk about it. Absolutely. And to my viewers, stay well, keep wearing your mask, get that shot, get out there and get vaccinated when you can. And I'll see you all on the other side. So thank you, everyone. And we will talk soon. Bye-bye.