Daniel J. Peterson

Two major events in 2015 completely changed my life. One, in December of that year, was the birth of my daughter Talia. But in May of 2015, Tally’s sibling, Mind Bubble, was born. My friend Eric and I had spent months complaining about the lack of volunteer tutor opportunities in Atlanta that matched the experiences we’d enjoyed back in Ann Arbor, Michigan where we’d met, until we finally decided to start our own nonprofit. We spent the next year teaching ourselves what we needed to know to get our operation up and running, and, thanks to Eric’s connections at Emory University and our friend Tony at Challenges Games and Comics (in the North DeKalb Mall at the time), we opened our doors to our first tutoring session in the fall of 2016.

I joked then (and obviously still do now) that Mind Bubble was Tally’s sibling since, much like my then-newborn, Mind Bubble required a lot of my time, attention, and care in those early days. Now, over eight years since Mind Bubble’s founding and about seven years on from our first tutoring sessions, Mind Bubble is leaving the nest (likely at least a decade before Mind Bubble’s sibling does). Our friends at the DeKalb County Public Library have absorbed Mind Bubble into their operations, and I am so excited that Mind Bubble has finally outgrown us and will carry on under fantastic new leadership! During this transition time, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on my own journey with Mind Bubble, what led to this transition, and what the future has in store.

From day one, my goals for Mind Bubble have been pretty simple: I had a wonderful time in graduate school volunteering as a tutor with 826Michigan, and I wanted to create a similar environment (with a game-focused twist) for volunteers working with students in our community. That focus on environment was key to what Eric and I wanted Mind Bubble to be – too often, students find learning to be a chore, and we wanted Mind Bubble to serve as a light-hearted, fun space that they were excited to enter and spend their time in on evenings and weekends. We wanted our students and tutors to form genuine connections over homework and games to foster the students’ love of learning so that they could see themselves, and identify, as learners into the future.

Building and maintaining an engaging environment like the one we envisioned required a lot of time and energy, but we made great strides in our first few years. I was especially proud of the volunteer response as we had a large number of regulars who came back, week after week, because they valued the community and vibe our programming fostered. Having a stable core of committed volunteers is essential for nonprofits tackling colossal issues like educational disparities, and I think those in the nonprofit world often pay insufficient attention to the volunteer experience. For instance, in Mind Bubble’s early years, we applied for a grant whose funders seemed to like our program and mission but felt that we were too focused on serving our volunteers. But how is a nonprofit like Mind Bubble supposed to reach any of its student-focused goals without a deep bench of enthusiastic volunteers to help us achieve them? We found, in Mind Bubble’s early days, that some of our students would drive over an hour each way just to be a part of the environment we fostered and take advantage of the services we offered. Take away some of those excited volunteers and I wager many of our students would have stopped attending, even if our programs moved much, much closer to them.

The continued growth of our programs felt like a vindication that we’d hit on a method of building community and serving our families that resonated with all of our stakeholders, and in February of 2020, it felt like we were hitting our stride: our Wednesday tutoring sessions each week at Agnes Scott College were breaking attendance records, and we had so many volunteers and students at our Sunday tutoring sessions at the Decatur Library that we had trouble fitting everyone into the space we had reserved. We all know what happened one month later when, due to COVID, the world shut down. Mind Bubble was no exception. Eric and I knew we would have to cancel our in-person tutoring sessions and workshops, but, while I initially just thought we could cancel all programming and resume in a few months when everything was better (yes, I really was that naive), Eric pushed us to consider ways in which we could move Mind Bubble’s programing online to better serve our community during this time. So, a few weeks after shutting down due to COVID, Mind Bubble hosted its first virtual tutoring sessions and workshop.

Our initial online programming was pretty anemic in the spring of 2020 as students, parents, and volunteers were all reeling from the shifting expectations and changes in schooling. But by Fall of 2020, we found that the flexibility of our new online format appealed to a whole swath of students left behind by virtual classes as well as volunteers looking for a way to give back to their community at a time when they couldn’t volunteer anywhere in-person. When we moved Mind Bubble’s programming online, our goal was to keep it as close to our in-person model as possible. We did this for several reasons, the first of which was that Mind Bubble has always been, in our mind, an in-person-first program, and we didn’t want our students and volunteers to adapt to a new system that would completely change once we returned to in-person tutoring. Second, though, our online programs were kept as close to our in-person programs as possible because that’s what we knew how to run successfully. So we hosted two weekly 2-hour tutoring sessions via Zoom during our usual Wednesday night and Sunday afternoon time slots. There were some programmatic changes, of course, necessitated by the change in modality, like the fact that we now paired two tutors with every student so that we never left a minor and an adult volunteer alone in an unmonitored Zoom breakout room, but, by and large, our virtual Mind Bubble sessions were adaptations of our old model to a new format rather than sessions designed, from the bottom up, to best serve all of our students and volunteers in the virtual format.

Years past, and COVID necessitated that we remain virtual. The appetite for a return to in-person programming just wasn’t there for most of our families and volunteers. At the same time, the limitations of the virtual format were becoming increasingly apparent. Hosting two virtual sessions a week required a lot of administrative work on our end that the in-person sessions hadn’t, and Mind Bubble still had no paid staff to help support it. Student access to Mind Bubble’s programs now required a stable internet connection and a computer, with webcam and microphone, that students could use continuously for up to 2 hours. Many of our students experienced technical difficulties, and the volunteers working with them sometimes spent half an hour or more at a session just trying to help a student troubleshoot their computer problems. I came to the eventual conclusion that one of the greatest drawbacks to virtual tutoring is the tutor’s inability to direct a student’s attention in a virtual tutorial. At our in-person tutoring sessions, volunteers could sit with students in a quiet, controlled environment to direct the student’s attention to a particular passage or homework problem while, virtually, students were often joining us from noisy environments, and volunteers were competing with video games or movies playing in the background for students’ attention. I want to be crystal clear that not all of our students during this time contributed to these problems, but enough did that the experience and environment for students and tutors alike suffered.

So we were ecstatic, in the fall of 2022, to reintroduce one in-person tutoring session a week at Agnes Scott’s campus. Returning to our in-person model would bring us back to the kind of tutoring we knew, and did, best. It would provide a better experience for our volunteers and students alike that would lead to more learning, better grades, and more fun. And we assumed that after years online, our families would be as excited as we were to get students off the computers and back to in-person interactions. But the world had changed, and we were surprised to discover that the appetite for our weekly in-person tutoring session, despite continuous verbal and written indications of interest from parents, just wasn’t there. Despite returning to the same model and venue that had been successful for us in the past, our parents and students seemed much more interested in the convenience afforded by the virtual tutoring options than our in-person tutoring sessions. As the semester went on, despite a devoted core of excellent, dedicated volunteers, attendance at our in-person tutoring sessions declined to the point where we committed to returning to virtual-only tutoring in the spring of 2023.

When Eric and I discussed what had happened with our return to in-person programming, a major theme we kept returning to is that parents and students were just in a very different place 3 years into the COVID pandemic than they were in the months before it began. Educational expectations had shifted, and schools and nonprofits across the country were stepping into roles they hadn’t before. Many school districts in our area provided students with free on-demand tutoring through paid virtual tutoring services or free after-school on-site tutoring services. What we needed to make Mind Bubble’s return to in-person tutoring successful, we realized, was to go where the students were – asking parents to drive their student(s) to a college campus on a weeknight or weekend was asking too much at a time when so many expectations around accessibility and educational resources had shifted.

But our current model, with our current leadership, had important limitations: we offered sessions on weeknights and weekends when and where we did because both Eric and I were the only regular (and still entirely volunteer) staff at Mind Bubble, and we both worked jobs that made running regular tutoring sessions at more accessible times for our students impossible for us. If Mind Bubble was going to manage a successful return to in-person programming, then it would need to do so without Eric and me at the helm.

It was around this time that we began our conversation with the DeKalb County Public Library about their newly-renovated Tobie Grant Homework Help Center. The space was (and is) excellent, and they had dozens of students showing up for homework help there every day after school. However, the DCPL did not have a deep bench of volunteer tutors to call on to work with these students. The match seemed perfect: Tobie had students who needed tutors, and Mind Bubble had volunteers looking to get involved. So, after months of working out the logistics, Mind Bubble officially dissolved as a nonprofit entity over the summer of 2023, and the DCPL took point on running Mind Bubble tutoring sessions starting in September 2023. Eric and I have stayed involved with the DCPL’s Mind Bubble operations, serving as consultants throughout the transition and running orientations for new volunteers to ensure that the tutors helping out at Mind Bubble tutoring sessions have the knowledge and skills necessary to serve our students and families well. It’s been amazing to take a step back from Mind Bubble and wonder at the amazing work the team at the DCPL have done in bringing the programs we started to new students and a new setting, and I’m excited to continue volunteering with them into the future.

It’s been quite an experience over the past 8 years, working hard to help Mind Bubble grow and adapt through what have been some pretty remarkable shifts in the world. The final and most important thing that comes to my mind as I reflect back on my years with Mind Bubble is gratitude for the support we’ve enjoyed from our community. In my 7 years of Mind Bubble programming, we ran hundreds of tutoring sessions and 70 workshops, none of which would have been possible without the amazing volunteers who tutored students and facilitated our workshops, donors who kept us afloat financially, and family members who brought their students to our programs and helped us spread the word. I know that our community will continue to support the DCPL as they carry our programs forward, and I can’t wait to be a part of this new chapter for Mind Bubble in the kind of role I’ve wanted since Mind Bubble began: serving as just another volunteer.