National Highlights

Adjusting to New Protocols

This past year hasn’t been easy, as students living in low-income communities continue being disproportionately affected by COVID-19. As we’ve entered another year of the pandemic, we continue to learn how to adapt to deliver services to students effectively. The goal remains the same, to keep students connected to their education and help them succeed throughout high school and beyond.

With lockdown restrictions varying by province based on the number of cases and public health measures, staff across the country continued pivoting. This meant they often had to balance between delivering a blend of in-person and virtual supports and monitoring sudden school openings and closings. Together, they worked on addressing the barriers faced by students by offering additional programming centered around their health and well-being, providing food supports, creating necessary connections, and more.

Students were provided with devices and tools such as laptops and accessible virtual tutoring. They attended virtual classes that taught them important life skills such as budgeting, cooking, and preparing nutritious meals, and they participated in experiential opportunities that took them outdoors. Food supports were provided, with Program Partners putting resources together to help students and their families. Students were also given the space to interact with their peers or check in with staff regularly, both virtually or in-person, to address isolation.

Pathways staff were able to find ways to quickly mobilize within and in their communities as a collective to address students' most urgent needs. They experienced how stressful this situation was, and in turn, our Program Partners also focused on ensuring that staff took care of themselves. This experience taught them that it is possible to do virtual learning and re-engage with young people while prioritizing their safety. We thank our dedicated program staff for all their hard work in continuing to deliver on our mission throughout another year of adaptation and adjustment.

Last year, we conducted a Youth Connectedness Survey for students to reflect on how they felt during the start of the pandemic. The findings suggest that Pathways students see the program as a source of ongoing support. Even when offered virtually, the program generates a sense of belonging: survey participants view time spent with Pathways as valuable, feel comfortable asking for help, and see interactions with staff as critical to achieving their personal and academic goals. The sense of connectedness to the program is clear: young people know that program staff care about their well-being and provide relevant supports.

Enhancing Program Delivery and Reach by Leveraging People, Process, Data, and Technology

Pathways is a social innovation—that is part of our DNA. For the last five years, we have taken a piloting approach to test how programming is delivered and what it needs to be so that it stays relevant for students. Since then, we’ve committed to reaching more students and explored ways to enhance our program delivery to current students.

We recently approached this by working with communities across the country to address the challenges and opportunities they’re facing. Using a pilot approach that allows us to experiment on a small scale, we examine how best to leverage people, process, data, and technology. Our work focuses on consulting and co-creating potential solutions with students, Pathways Program staff, and other community partners.

Here are a few examples of pilots we have been working on throughout the last year:

• We are currently piloting an on-demand text-based tutoring service in multiple Ontario Pathways locations to provide increased flexibility for students who are busy with part-time jobs or other commitments. The goal is to determine whether an on-demand solution could be an effective complimentary tool next to the traditional tutoring programming we provide. Using data from the technology will help identify utilization and insights into students’ use of the tool. And focus groups with participants will provide additional context and help inform decision-making around potential scale across the country.
• In an annual satisfaction survey, students at Pathways Vancouver and Surrey identified an interest in continuing virtual programming. Program operations were also challenged with high demand from students and families, exceeding their capacity to support traditionally. As a result, a virtual-only programming pilot was created, where students can access tutoring, mentoring, and one-on-one support. New processes have been developed to deliver effectively, building on what was learned through the pandemic. We are collaborating with the Program Partner to identify technology solutions that can enhance this delivery approach, collect the data required to know it is working, and evaluate the impact over the next three years.

In using a pilot approach, Pathways is able to engage with a subset of Program Partners to test theories or solutions on a smaller scale, requiring a lower initial financial and time investment, and reducing uncertainty and risk associated with introducing and implementing changes more broadly. All pilots are assessed against expected outcomes and lessons learned which also help to inform future pilots. In this way, we have reignited our capacity as a truly social innovation.