One Bead

Thank you Senator Mike Rush for sponsoring budget amendment 729, providing funds for One Bead to offer entrepreneurship and tech equity programming for kids in Boston! We are so grateful for your support of our program and our mission! 😌

“This (blazer) makes me feel good. Can I wear it for the rest of the day?” —Aiden

We set the bar high, but you help us set it even higher! Donate today to help One Bead reach even more students in 2022.

For more reasons to give, check out this newsletter written by our CEO:

Five Reasons to Give

A long overdue welcome to One Bead’s newest Program Director, Michelle Perez! Michelle joined our team in September and is leading our programs at The Ellis, Higginson-Lewis, KIPP Academy Lynn, and Bradley Elementary (where she was once a student)!

Prior to One Bead, Michelle provided speech and language therapy to students in grades K-5. Michelle excels at connecting with students and families and is already an invaluable member of organization.

Welcome, Michelle! 👏🏼☺️

Happy Giving Tuesday ❤️

This year we’re fundraising for our middle schoolers 💪🏽 because

Advocating for others takes courage. When our students stand up for a cause they believe in, their confidence grows. And when their confidence grows, so does their ability to advocate for themselves.

This is especially important for the demographic that One Bead serves: students with IEPs; students who are the only English-speaker in their household; students who will be the first in their family to go to college. This population must learn how to advocate for themselves long before they pursue a degree. And yet, there are very few opportunities for kids, especially those living in low-income communities, to develop self-advocacy skills at a young age.

That’s where you come in! Donate now via our to help us provide middle schoolers across Boston with the leadership skills they need to succeed in high school and beyond❤️✨



PS. Recognize any of the middle schoolers pictured here? 😉

2020: This morning I flew back to Boston. As I boarded the plane, I spotted my seat next to a young couple…and their 14 month old. I didn’t have time to settle in before the couple started apologizing: “We are sorry in advance for EVERYTHING.” “We didn’t know someone was sitting here!” “Do you like Cheerios?”

In some ways, I think being a good after-school program director is like sitting next to parents with a 14 month old on a 3+ hour flight during a pandemic. The parents are doing their best. The baby is doing her best. And your job is to show everyone that you understand this by smiling with your eyes whenever the opportunity presents itself.

In 2020, my team and I learned how to be better Program Directors. Not because we improved our curriculum or learned any new classroom control tactics, but because we spent more time getting to know parents and guardians. We asked them what they needed. We provided what we could. And we adorned it all with empathy.

After all, they are the ones holding the cheerios. 😏💪🏼❤️

2018/2019: When choosing photos for this project, I struggled with 2018 and 2019. On the surface, it seemed like not a whole lot happened during this two-year span. But now, I would argue that this is because everything happened.
 
Our team doubled in size, and with that growth came a renewed sense of self. We became more confident as teachers, school partners, and co-workers. We went all in for our students. But not without growing pains.
 
When I was in high school, my mom tore a page out of a magazine with a quote by Michelangelo on it. It read, “If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all.”
 
By the end of 2019, my team and I were ready to unveil our Sistine Chapel. Instead, we found ourselves on Zoom, navigating remote learning amid a global pandemic. And while it may seem like we rose to the challenge–the truth is we learned how to pivot, how be scrappy, how to rewrite strategic plans, long before 2020.
 
So 2018 and 2019, this is my love letter to you. Your sweaty, tear-stained, sleep-deprived days are what make this journey all the more wondrous. ✨

2017: The year “me” became “we”!

Over the last decade, I’ve been lucky enough to work with 5 full-time employees, 1 part-time employee, and 9 interns. Together, we’ve shaped One Bead into the organization you know today. 🥳

But not without challenges. One lesson I’ve learned is that in order to get feedback in my role, I have to ask for it (or risk waiting until everyone hits their breaking point and is fed up with me, which I have also tried and do not recommend).

However, asking for feedback, I’ve found, is not always as straight forward as it sounds.

Outside of One Bead, I am (or was up until the pandemic hit) a yoga instructor. During training, I was taught to replace “Does this feel okay?” with “More pressure? Or less?” when offering hands on adjustments to students. While the first question implies that being uncomfortable means you are ‘not okay’, the second two questions empower the student to consider how/if the adjustment could improve their practice.

I didn’t think much of this nuance until a couple of months later, when I was frustrated with a co-worker and sought out advice from one of my mentors. “Every time I ask this employee if they are okay, they say yes. But then something happens and it is obvious to me that they are overwhelmed” I said, fully convinced that I was the world’s best boss.

“Well, maybe you are asking the wrong question,” My mentor responded. “After all, who wants to tell their boss that they are not okay?” In that moment, it dawned on me that what I needed to ask was “More pressure? Or less?” aka “Do you want me to take this off your plate? Or do you want to make time to work through it together?”

This picture of Maddy (my first employee) and Eliza (our intern at the time) crunching numbers on my living room couch is one of my favorites from 2017. Although, I’m sure if I could go back and ask, they would say “more space”, “less numbers”… 🛋👩🏼‍💻🥴

2016: I didn’t know it at the time, but after reflecting on the last decade, it is obvious—2016 was a transition.

I began the year running yet another out-of-state program. After that, I headed back to Boston, determined to identify a local partner–Not easy in a city saturated with nonprofits. But unlike before, I had data to back up my model, and that helped.

I can’t remember whose idea it was initially to film the documentary, but I remember why we did it: We wanted our supporters to understand the connection between One Bead’s current work and my entrepreneurial experience in college. In the years that followed, hundreds of students would watch the short film, and hear my story.

Looking back though, the documentary seems as much a gift to me as it was a resource on our website and in the classroom. It brought closure to a period of my life that felt upended and introduced me to people who would become life-long friends and One Bead supporters.

Our community was growing. This was just the beginning.

2014: After graduation, I moved to Boston, MA. I gave myself one year to see if I could find funding to do One Bead full-time. To make ends meet, I sold olive oil on Newbury Street, photographed a couple of weddings, and worked as a temp in the development office. Every day at 5 PM, I left my cubicle, hopped on the orange line (🚊), and headed to the Boys & Girls Club where I ran one of our first pilot programs. Nights and weekends were reserved for fundraising. It took nine months and 109 meetings before I was introduced to a woman who wrote me the check that would become my initial salary.

And that’s when things got really interesting. At this point, I was still new to Boston and didn’t have credibility in the public school system. However, someone in upstate New York got wind of what I was doing and offered to pay for a program. So, I did what any founder would do: I found a couch I could sleep on (TY ) and spent the fall of 2014 running One Bead’s first full program with 54 students at North Street Elementary.

This picture was taken at the very end of the program. I am smiling. A deceiving look considering three days prior I was standing in Amy Forbes’s office in tears. The heat wasn’t working in my apartment, which meant I was now sleeping in everything I owned plus a hat and mittens. I was exhausted.

Amy laughed and said, “SARA! This is the ramen noodle chapter of your autobiography! No one wants to read a book where everything is okay and then something good happens and then it ends.”

That advice got me through the year. And, eventually, things did get easier. But not before getting infinitely harder (it turns out my ramen noodle chapter was a long one).

🍜

2013: Before there were full-time employees, there were interns. And before there were interns, there were college reps–this post is my love letter to you. And to all my friends/family who continue to volunteer their time to One Bead in significant (albeit oftentimes unglamourous) ways.

2013 was my senior year of college. It was also the peak of One Bead’s bead-selling era. For proof, look no further than my iPhone 5 photo archives. For every collection of blurry photos outside of a fraternity house, there is a series from afternoons spent tabling (selling beads) outside of Saga (the dining hall).

In between studying for finals, I hosted volunteer workshops disguised as wine nights where friends would come over and help me fulfill online orders in exchange for a glass of pinot. Those were the days. Kind of. Our packaging was made from recycled bags and the production required a home-made stencil and customized stamp. Not exactly sustainable when you’re shipping hundreds of bracelets across the country…

But I learned a lot during this time. I learned that college students love tank tops. I learned that having merchandise also requires you to know things about sales tax (it varies by state) and profit margins (🤯). I learned that counting your inventory at the end of the year includes every. single. jump ring. And I learned that predicting the right ratio of t-shirt sizes for a bulk order is not a forte of mine as evidenced by the boxes of leftover shirts under my bed ( ).

A couple of years later, a mentor said, “What do you want your legacy to be? Do you want to be known for the number of beads you sold or the lives you changed as a result of your programming?” I chose the latter and he challenged me to build a business model reflective of that decision. It was a game-changer.

However I kept the name One Bead–as a reminder of our roots, but also a marketing tactic. It turns out that being part of “One Bead” in middle school is a lot cooler than the “Youth Leadership Program”. 😏⚡️