Three years on…

I’m finally writing a week note, because I felt like I wanted to mark the date of 17th March which has just passed. It was St Patrick’s Day yes, but the date also has new meaning for me now and is forever etched in my brain as the day we went home from work and stayed home. In fundraising and comms we wrote the date many times when updating supporters and writing reports, ‘on Tuesday 17 March 2020, we closed the doors to our ships in Hackney and Haringey’. A moment in history for sure. (And on 23 March the government told us to stay home… as we all know, what we thought would be a week or maybe 10 days, turned into many weeks.)

Just ten days after we moved to working from home, the Virtual Ship was born, with writing and reading challenges shared via YouTube, beaming live from Andrew, Alex and Aaron’s homes. The team used WhatsApp to receive YPs work and give feedback. It was really impressive how quickly the team rallied and continued to support the YPs on board that year. We saw that the children we supported still wanted to be in session, whatever format that took. We missed our Crewmates and devised ways to bring them back. We innovated and changed as the world grabbled with the ‘new normal’.

Personally, it was a really tricky time. Living in a small space with a 2.5 year old child, both myself and my partner working and navigating the many challenges that came with trying to give attention to work and a toddler. I look back and it feels a bit blurry.

I was grateful for the Hackney space, where I’d come with my son to feed the fish and check the building, a much needed change of scene!

I’m not sure as a collective society we’ve processed those lockdown days, the vast amounts of unknown that we humans find so hard to integrate. I think it will take a long time. But I’m proud of how we reacted in our small part of the world, continuing to support the children we’d committed to despite it all. We really embraced, ‘Adventures in Learning’!