Things at Mind Bubble have been busy recently – so busy, in fact, that I haven’t had the chance to update my site with Mind Bubble news since 2016! Whoops! Tutoring resumed in late January 2017 after our winter break, and we added a new Sunday tutoring session staffed by community volunteers. So far, the new session has been a success and has allowed us to serve a number of students who would otherwise have ended up on our waitlist; however, at the moment, we’re only averaging two to three community tutors per week, which makes our second session much smaller than our first session, which usually matches 10-12 tutors with students. We’re hoping to build up our tutor base and provide more tutors for our students during that second session over the course of the next several weeks.
The other exciting piece of Mind Bubble news is that we’ll be starting up a Wednesday tutoring session at Edwin Jarvis in Avondale Estates in mid-March. This tutoring session will also be staffed by community volunteers, and we’re expecting it too to start out small and grow with time. It’s exciting to build this relationship with Edwin Jarvis and bring our services into a new neighborhood, so thanks to Edwin Jarvis for making this expansion possible!
These new sessions are exciting, but their success is contingent on our successfully recruiting (and retaining) new volunteer tutors. Mind Bubble is currently involved in a number of new tutor recruitment efforts, but, in the meantime, if you happen to know anyone in the metro Atlanta area who’d be willing to volunteer their time (even occasionally) to tutor and play some games with some truly excellent middle schoolers, please send them to our website and ask them to sign up. The Mind Bubble experience has been a great one for volunteer tutors and students alike (11 of our 13 Emory volunteer tutors from last semester returned this semester), and we’d love to have more people be a part of it!
That’s all for now, but I’ll be posting more Mind Bubble news in the coming weeks and months as we kick off our Spring fundraiser and finalize details about our first-ever set of volunteer-led workshops. Stay tuned!
Daniel J. Peterson 