Last week at the Hub we had 46 individual youth generate a total of 100 logins over the course of five days. An average of 20 logins per day.

During that same week in 2017, we had 62 logins over the course of the week (generated by 29 individual youth) which was an average of 12.4 logins per day.

Here’s how those numbers break down by town and gender served.

Wow, what a week! We saw almost 50 faces and had some great numbers overall. There’s quite a bit to cover in this report, but I’d like to get to the concerning part first.

Around this time last year, we had a pretty even split between female and male attendance. Some of the change comes down to older students graduating, especially students who started coming in at a time where we had a non-binary employee and a female AmeriCorps member.
While we can hope that simply having Tayler, our new AmeriCorps member who starts at the end of the month, will help make the Hub more accessible to female and non-binary students from Mt. Abe, I’m very much looking forward to the study that UVM CDAE students will be running which has a focus on getting more of an equal gender split to the teen center.
From talking to the female and non-binary youth we do have, it seems like the only barrier is how we communicate what we do to those populations but obviously we have very open minds and are excited to hear how we can work towards gaining back those populations.

This week we initiated partnerships with Sweet Clover Market in Essex and HOPE in Middlebury. Starting next week, we will be receiving excess product (especially local and organic foods) from Sweet Clover Market every Monday, and deliveries of fresh local produce from HOPE on Thursdays, both at no cost to tax payers.
It is our hope to not only supplement our yearly $2500 food budget, but to reduce it substantially for next budget year by building more partnerships like these (while steadily increasing the nutritional benefits of the meals we provide for youth).

On Monday, we hosted a Magic: The Gathering (trading card game) event for youth and had great participation. Playing trading card games encourages social interaction (something that, to begin with, is not lacking at the Hub) and critical thinking skills. With the gracious donations of Magic cards we’ve received over the last few years, new players can start playing the game without having to spend any of their money in the process.
We are going to be hosting monthly events like this, but also are looking into hosting a monthly “Screens Off” day with a local games store, Tinker & Smithy from Middlebury. One day a month, we would host an event where video games and phones are put down to play board and card games.

Magic Monday!

Chace and Moises on Taco Tuesday!