Why 2020 has been painful and powerful for TeenSHARP

We recently held our College Signing Day and TeenSHARP once again delivered on our mission to help Black and Latino students attend America’s most selective colleges.

We have students going to Yale, Howard University, Tulane, Johns Hopkins, Swarthmore, Gettysburg, Carleton College, University of Pennsylvania, and many more top colleges. Powerful stuff!

This doesn’t happen enough so I’m going to take some space here to acknowledge Tatiana Poladko, my wife and co-founder, and the TeenSHARP team.

They never give a behind the scenes look at the sacrifice and the struggle that goes into the work and it can almost seem effortless.

But on a scale of 1 to 10, our 2019-2020 program year has had a difficulty level of 50.

Our program year starts in August and between July and August we learned that 3 critical staff members would be moving on to other opportunities.

It’s something you expect when you have very talented staff on nonprofit salaries but it always presents major challenges nonetheless.

To put it in context, TeenSHARP only had 7 salaried staff members and we were losing 3 right before the new program year!

To make matters worse, we had an extremely tight financial year and didn’t have the resources to replace 2 of those positions.

So most on the team had to do more and had to plug holes to support hundreds of students across the region.

Some balls dropped, some families complained, the pressure was high, and the team had to be resourceful.

It wasn’t pretty but the program year launched in August and things got even more complicated as Tatiana and I had our third child in September!

That meant Tatiana had to deal with everything that comes with birthing and caring for a tiny human while also managing an extreme workload.

So, once again, she wasn’t able to take any maternity leave and our newborn was regularly nursing while she was advising students.

Flash forward to the Spring of 2020 and COVID-19 decided to turn the difficulty level all the way up during a year when we were severely understaffed/resourced.

In just a few days, the TeenSHARP team moved all of our programs virtual as if they had some “in case of a pandemic” plan sitting on the shelf.

The team created an entirely new program— Cyber SPARK— to keep our students learning while schools weren’t teaching new content.

We offered weekly workshops for parents on Wednesdays in English and Thursdays in Spanish to help them navigate education during a pandemic.

We even had our first cyber college tour that featured conversations with two women of color college presidents.

We were figuring things out, the end of the program year was in sight, and then tragedy hit.

Tatiana learned her mother had cancer and we lost her within a month of that devastating news. With Ukraine’s borders closed due to COVID-19, we couldn’t even get to her or attend her funeral.

2020 has been painful. 

But while we grieve and want to complain we try not to ignore the many joyful moments we have been afforded.

We are buoyed by the beautiful and selfless TeenSHARP staff members and volunteers who navigate their own personal challenges to support our mission.

We are encouraged by the families who continue to trust us and commit to TeenSHARP.

We are fueled by the friends of our work who donate their money and time to keep the enterprise in motion.

And our TeenSHARP students make our hearts sing and remind us each day why we need to keep pressing.

We’re building something special and your support is much appreciated: teensharp.org/donate/