Interview with Lynda Tilley

Lynda Tilley is the Executive Director of Moorelands Kids. Lynda talks about the challenges they've faced during the pandemic, including cancelling in-person summer camp two years in a row.

Watch: https://youtu.be/UjeQjh5brCM

Unedited transcript.

Jim Allan: Running an organization during a pandemic. Not easy for anyone, especially if you're trying to run a summer camp. Lynda Tilley is the executive director of Moorelands Kids, which these days does a lot of things, including run a summer camp. So welcome, Lynda.

Lynda Tilley: Thank you.

Jim Allan: How would you describe Moorelands Kids to people who don't know what you do?

Lynda Tilley: Well, we've got some good visuals on that, but just to say it verbally, we reach out to young people in the city who have economic challenges and barriers, to give them opportunities to do after-school programs and summer camp programs, all based on leadership, hopefully to strengthen their core and help them to be more well-rounded citizens in the end.

Jim Allan: March 2020, everything shut down. Tell me what that was like, March 2020.

Lynda Tilley: It was really interesting because I got a phone call from somebody that said the schools are closed. We had programs in the schools and I phoned the city programs manager and she said, I don't think the school knows that. And they hadn't even got it yet. And they were closing for a couple of weeks to hopefully stave off any of the problems that COVID could bring for people coming back from March break. So everyone thought it was for two weeks. And of course, as we know, that was a much different journey. But we just met together and you know, one of the things that is a strength of Moorelands kids is community, is our community. And that is what I've tried to build at Moorelands. It probably comes from camp life as well, but that's what you need. You can never do this job on your own. So our, you know, our staff team, that was one community and our kids, they needed this and all of a sudden everything was pulled out from them. So we met together and decided we need to do something. What can we do? And by March 30th, so two weeks later, we had programs online where we would do after school and parents relied on us for a safe place for their kids to go. We couldn't provide that anymore because we couldn't be in the schools and neither could they. So we came into their homes, which was very different and we started doing our after-school programs every day for them, until June. Yeah, and in May the government said overnight camps could not open. So we transitioned overnight camp to online. We thought we'd have about 350 registrations and we had over 400.

Jim Allan: I know a dentist that lives around here, he shut his business down immediately so he could lay off his staff so they could apply for unemployment. It's like, didn't you, did you have to lay off staff or?

Lynda Tilley: Well, I think that's something to be really proud of is that our core, our full-time staff, did not have any layoffs or reduction in work, but they ran everything and then our part-time staff, we did lay them off and they were able to get the government support, which was great. We didn't know, we didn't know what that was gonna look like at the beginning. So those same people who ran the office, most of them were at the camp, cutting the grass, making videos, running cabin groups with kids, as everything else was shut down.

Jim Allan: Yeah, I mean, did you ever consider shutting the whole thing down or, I mean, it would have been devastating, of course, but...

Lynda Tilley: You know that we, the board, what happened, this is the board community behind us, they started meeting every week and so we, it was obviously on Zoom, but we met every week to just touch base because it changed as it still does all the time and it's really tough to lead in that time. People are looking at you for, to you for answers that you just cannot produce and yet you've got to have an opinion and you've got to know, you know, what you're doing about this. So it was really tough and so the board met every week to look at direction and what we should do and just kind of forecast things for the organization because we want to protect our kids and we want to protect what we have in terms of an organization that meets kids' needs. So I'd have to say it never came up to shut the place down. Never.

Jim Allan: It crossed my mind that your very existence might have been at risk. Because part of it ,you count on donations to exist. I'm assuming they're down. Some of the people that would donate to you probably lost their jobs.

Lynda Tilley: Definitely. So the whole kind of... And there was a lot of fear for all of us because we didn't know what was coming next. So you know, I don't have those stats in front of us, me, but I know that at one point, you know, we were sort of 40% down and that kind of thing and thinking, but we were adjusting as well our expenses and and then in the end there was a bit of a, you know, we got some government funding to improve our technology, which is something would be at the bottom of the line for a budget item when we need to, you know, it's more about the kids' programs and here this tech, this improvement really helped us because we've had to be online all this time. So that was, you know, and there's some other wins that have come out of this for us. It's still really tough for families who, you know, we, the parents are those frontline workers and have to go to work and their kids have nowhere to go during the day and that kind of thing is still going on. But for the older kids, there's a few wins that have come out of this. Well, and a year and a half later, I mean, there's some Zoom fatigue too, I suspect.

Jim Allan: Now, I mean, then there was a second summer... So, I mean, again, just back to this donor idea, because I worry about your cash flow… if Coke isn't on the shelf for a couple of years, you might reach for a Pepsi or something. They might forget about you. You know, I know someone that was thinking, why should I give you guys money if you're not actually doing the camp anymore, even though you're trying your hardest during the virtual stuff, but it's not quite the same.

Lynda Tilley: Oh, it's definitely not and it's not ideal. But there's need there and we met those needs and we have this amazing property, as you know, that that is the most beautiful property on Kawagama Lake and you have to maintain that. So there are fixed costs. You know, you have to insure it. You have to cut the grass. Are you going to lose it? It's going to turn into a hay field and the sports field and things like that. So we did have to do that. This year, we were going through 2021 with two plans. You know, we had about six at the beginning and then just weeded it down to what was viable here. And so we had like even a hybrid of at camp with reduced numbers and online. And then as we talked it through and the board really made a decision based on safety, that we are working with kids from the high risk neighborhoods with the highest infection rates. And the vaccination rates are a little lower in the community serving. They were better, you know, and we had some of our families say we'd do anything to get our kids to camp, but we won't get vaccinated because that and that, you know, over the summer vaccinations ramped up a lot more, but they were just sort of starting.

Jim Allan: And then some other camps definitely did kind of roll, in my opinion, rolled the dice and opened.

Lynda Tilley: Yep.

Jim Allan: And I thought of you guys, I was waiting and waiting and waiting and you decided to close. So you played it safe.

Lynda Tilley: We did. Yeah.

Jim Allan: Just for your own.

Lynda Tilley: And I would say based on safety for the kids and honestly based on wisdom, I think that was the wisest decision that we could make for the children we serve. Yeah. And, you know, one of the things the kids, the camps that opened, nobody provided transportation that was off the table for everybody. We always have to take our kids. We always have to provide busing because.

Jim Allan: You're more or less on an island and if there was an emergency, getting them off the island is tricky.

Lynda Tilley: And lots of our families don't have vehicles. They live in the city. To get them up mid-camping. And they can't afford them.

Jim Allan: Yeah.

Lynda Tilley: So we looked at, you know, a bus that you can imagine the cost when you take a 55 passenger coach and put like 16 kids in it. Now how many. Because there's social distancing on the buses and things. Well, to keep that intact. And then there was, you know, you look at the protocols that were in place. You really do diminish what you could do at camp. And, you know, saying that children won't mix, children don't function like that.

Jim Allan: Yeah.

Lynda Tilley: And so, and we just felt it would be really detrimental if we had cases there. And, and I know if we had to phone a family and say we've got a child with symptoms, they would be saying, get my child out of there. People are afraid. Our families are afraid. That's why they didn't go back to school. When the schools opened in September 2020. Oh my goodness. Where are we now? We just had 21. So even this year. We canvassed our families and a lot of them were going to keep their children home.

Jim Allan: Right.

Lynda Tilley: But the previous September schools did open and a lot of ours, a family said. We don't have enough information and we're afraid. So they kept their kids at home. So some of the kids we're working with, they have been literally at home since last March. And they're living in the apartments. They don't have a really nice big backyard to play in. And they also have extended family living in the apartment with them. That's who you hear about on the news all the time.

Jim Allan: Right.

Lynda Tilley: That's who we're serving. And so one of the things we did. And we had to justify this to the board, but we filmed our camps, our virtual camps at the camp. And there's a little bit cost involved in that. The first year we used all our core team. This year we hired extra staff to do that. But one of the things that, you know, one of the pieces of information that we took in was. During this time when children have lost so much, keep the familiar, familiar. To your point earlier that they can forget about camp or what they used to do in the summer and replace it with other things. It's been a long time.

Jim Allan: It's been a long time. 2019 was your last full-time year up there.

Lynda Tilley: And so we kept the familiar, familiar. And both years, oddly enough, we've had new people join us. So that's very interesting. We've never been to the camp. Yeah. This year we did it differently. It was our second go-around and hopefully our last because nobody wants to do this again. But we brought in, we did more cabin groups. So more live with kids because that's what they loved. And we also had a few other opportunities that they could do. Like on a Friday it was, we saw that through analytics, the numbers dropped off on Friday. People were doing other things for the weekend. So we'd made it a choose your own adventure day. And we had like a Toronto dance company do dance lessons. They could sign up for that and different things. Different opportunities we brought to the kids.

Jim Allan: I have two university age kids. And my prediction was when they went back, kids would go crazy. Like they would go, it would be wild. And it's kind of come to like, it's kind of happened. Like there's a lot of incidents in the news and everything. So, I mean, there's a lot of mental health issues. A lot of first year university students have been, they might be 17. The last time they were in a real school, they would have been 15. They've missed a couple of years of just maturing, I guess, too. And so, I mean, so those kids that you're serving, they really need you just from a mental health point of view, just to have some sort of normal interaction.

Lynda Tilley: It's tough. And so there's important work to be done out there. Well, and you think if you're working with an eight-year-old, city programs, you could be six. At camp, you would be eight. And this goes on for two years of your life. It's like arrested development. A quarter of your life you have lived like this with masks and all this craziness. And then getting back into this and socializing with kids in the schoolyard again is awkward.

Jim Allan: Odd and awkward.

Lynda Tilley: Exactly. We even saw that this year we brought everybody up who was helping us. Like we couldn't run all our cabin groups from the camp. We don't have enough internet. So we brought everybody there for training and to be part of it. And then some went home and they ran cabin groups from their home virtually and some others did it at the camp. But we really saw that awkwardness, that difficulty, just the social deficits that people had from not being together. And it was for a year and a bit, I've just kind of done whatever I wanted at home. Now even just coming together, they created a bit of a bubble there and they didn't leave for a month to get all this work done.

Jim Allan: You're talking about the staff.

Lynda Tilley: And I'm talking about the staff.

Jim Allan: They’re typically in their 20s, right?

Lynda Tilley: Yeah, 18 to 20. We had a couple of people on placement from college and it was tough. And what they described it as, and I believe kids are going through this too, it's grieving from normalcy. And children, like...

Jim Allan: There's some anger….

Lynda Tilley: There is. It's those stages of grief that you learn about. We did see a lot of that. We saw a lot of this mental health issues coming out just in the staff that we had in the summer. Now, magnify that for the kids when they come back.

Jim Allan: I thought about that too, because I kind of clicked on your site sometimes in some of the videos. And so I figured there's about 10... You had more people this year than last year.

Lynda Tilley: We had about 18 at the most. But even 10…

Jim Allan:  I've been there for the whole summer. If it was only 10 of you, I could see going a little crazy because did you have some first time staff there as well? Who they would have gone up and not known anyone. So you have to learn, you have to meet some new people and you've got sort of eight peers to choose from. And it would have been tough.

Lynda Tilley: Yeah.

Jim Allan: And you work with them. And then at the end of the day, when you're trying to relax, that's who you have.

Lynda Tilley: But funny enough... It's hard. Even our returning staff, they struggled because they knew what they were missing. The people who are new were just getting into this virtual camp. This is what they were doing. And to be honest, they were on a college placement, so they were really trying hard and they did a great job. They didn't have the visual to know what we're missing. What it usually sounds like.

Jim Allan: Yes.

Lynda Tilley: And the momentum and the magic that you're producing because it's all very distanced. When we talked about this, you said sort of like the last couple of years, 18 months. And for me, it's really been hard. I was sick in 2019 for most of the year, went into 2020, lost my husband, and then COVID hit kind of simultaneously.

Jim Allan: You had a bad year.

Lynda Tilley: A couple of them. A couple of bad years.

Jim Allan: And then you had to handle all of this at the same time.

Lynda Tilley: Yeah. And I think I had to make decisions along the way to cope, which sounds very simple. But it is a decision that you have to say, I'm going to press on. And I had to persevere. And I think my resiliency has really grown through that. When you reflect and you look back and you think I'm okay. I've made it through. I'm making it through. That's maybe how I should say that. And that's why I said, like, when you look at the stages of grieving, that's what I see these kids are going to go through as well. Like you said, the anger, the denial, then the acceptance, and then how do we move forward? And we want to be an organization that helps kids develop their resiliency to what they're going through and what they're grieving about. This is history making for these kids. When I talked to the staff at the beginning of the summer, I said to them, you know, we would say, Grandpa, I would have said, Grandpa, what was it like in the war? I said, put yourself 50 years forward and your grandkids are going, what was it like in the pandemic? Because this is going to be part of our history. And we keep hearing, it's not going away anytime soon. So how we coped and how we got through, how we responded, how we kept ourselves going through this time. And you know, we hear all kinds of reports. You brought it up, the mental health, you know, the cost to mental health. This is being as really heavy. People are relying on other sources and things to help them through, be it even negative things like alcohol or that type of thing, other addictive things. Everyone needs something to rely on. We want to be able to give kids hope and help them and build them up and help them get stronger. Basically more resilient to face and get through this.

Jim Allan: What I'm getting as a theme here is like giving up was never an option for you or Moorelands kids. Is that fair to say?

Lynda Tilley: Yeah, as you asked me before, and I never really thought of it, but like that, about that, but the board never said, should we close the doors? Could that have been in people's minds? Yeah, just like when you go through something tough, you say like, am I going to make it? But it was just navigating through and seeing how we are going to do that. It is one day at a time on that type of thing. Even a young person who is struggling with depression because they've been at home for a year and a half and they're anxious, how am I going to get through this? If it can be a positive connection with somebody from Moorelands, that's great. We want to be part of their story of how they made it. That's what we want to give.

Jim Allan: What's the current plan for 2022?

Lynda Tilley: Well, that plan has just been drawn up pretty much and it is to, we've got to have kids there basically. And to get, we're trying to get back to normal camp. We know, well, we don't know what the protocols will be. So we've based our budget and our plan on what we know now, which would be keep the kids together in a cohort. They can't mix with other cohorts. So you adjust the games, you adjust the schedule. We're planning on all of that. But again, we don't know where this will take us. And even today, I was just at home. It's our budget time right now. So I was in a meeting with that and it popped up on my phone. 425 cases in Ontario. And I was just like, that's down. That's down. That's good. Because we're hoping to get back in the schools. We still cannot go into the schools. We're hoping to get back into schools for after-school programs in January. That's up to school board. And then our next hope is camp that we can do that and sort of, we've already booked the buses and we've already, we're doing all that's in motion. And we just have to take it, not one day at a time, but as this changes, we have to be fluid and move with it. We really have to be able to, you know, I think a big focus for kids is to be resilient through all their experiences, is to help them to be resilient, to adapt, to be flexible as an organization. That's what we've got to do as well, is to be able to bounce back from what's being said to us. So it is with every intention to have children back at camp next year. And we're just hoping beyond hope that that's what we can do.

Jim Allan: If people want to donate to Moorelands kids or connect with you in some way, because you have a lot of different programs like the Christmas Wish program, you can donate food, et cetera. How do we get in touch with, how do we find you?

Lynda Tilley: Well, I can proudly say we've got an amazing website. And all the information is there. You can go about, there's programs, donate now. And you're right, Christmas Sharing is coming up. We're hoping our goal there is 150 families and about 200 baby bundles, which will help us through next year to work with moms who are marginalized. So there's, you know, if you're into babies, you can help by buying really practical things. Like there's a list online of what a baby bundle consists of. Everything from, you know, a baby blanket to diaper cream. And then Christmas Sharing, you can adopt a family, you can help a child, you can help a teen. There's lots of different ways. And we are hoping to have volunteers, in-person volunteers for Christmas Sharing again, depending on what the public health is directing us to do at that time. But that helps us get back to normal too, because we normally, you know, we involve a lot of volunteers in our work and we always welcome more.

Jim Allan: Thank you, Lynda, for stopping by.

Lynda Tilley: You've made it very easy.