noticing: my work as the Girls Code Lincoln board president

This week my term as Board President for Girls Code Lincoln ends. Saying goodbye to this leadership position is bittersweet.

Girls Code Lincoln a weekly coding camp for 4-9th grade girls in the Lincoln area. We are dedicated to always being completely free, and as such we’re entirely volunteer run. As you may imagine, crafting curriculum, communicating with parents, running club logistics every Sunday over the school year, in addition to fundraising and building our public reputation, is a huge volunteer lift.

Sometimes in the world of all-volunteer nonprofits we constantly feel like we’re not accomplishing what we wish we could – “if only I could give this my full attention,” “if only I had more time to give,” “if only more people volunteered!” While that is all true it also makes it easy to lose sight of what has been accomplished.

I started my term as board president in September of 2021, coming off of the pandemic. I often feel insecure that I was a lame-duck President for the organization and certainly I didn’t come close to accomplishing everything I hoped. However, I’m working on noticing. What can I notice, if I look back with clear eyes?

Since 2021 Girls Code Lincoln has…

• Girls Code Lincoln transitioned from being founder-run to building a new board and leadership team by recruiting new volunteers, including finding a new Director of Operations and all new leadership roles…
• …while coming back from the pandemic (I truly don’t think many orgs in that position could have or would have survived that double whammy – it is huge) and started club again!
• Managing the politically fraught mask, vaccine, and back-to-in-person debates in children’s education.
• We participated in Make Lincoln, Inspire Girls, Big Red Welcome, Homeschool Education Night with the Stars and more public and community events by hosting booths.
• Our board overhauled our bylaws and worked with the leadership team to start (and largely finish) a best practices and operational procedures guide.
• We hosted two board retreats, meeting for half day sessions to deep dive on future planning.
• Akriti Agrawal (an org co-founder) and I produced 8 monthly episode and 10 special edition episodes of the Girls Code Lincoln Podcast (to be transitioned to our YouTube channel). 
• Board members helped facilitate club tours at the University of Nebraska Drone and Eye Tracking Labs, The Emerging Media Arts Center, Firespring, and Hudl for our club members. 
• We started a tradition of thanking our core volunteers with gifts at the end of each semester, and created volunteer thank-you gifts in the form of shirts and hats.
• I overhauled, shortened, and re-wrote all of the opening leadership curriculum and our new Curriculum Director Bethany has started the process of overhauling the code curriculum.
• I supervised two University of Nebraska Career Development First Gen Student Interns in fundraising and public education. One of them helped us…
• Plan and host a fundraising mixer and silent auction in Spring 2023!
• We listened to parent and student concerns regarding parking and changed locations new this fall, and effort led by Ron and Val, a board member and our Director of Operations.
• We created a new website on a more accessible CMS to share the burden of updates and management, led by org co-founder and board member Justin.
• We ran ‘Give to Lincoln Day’ and End of Year Campaigns, TWICE, including mailers, emails, social media, and the resulting thank you notes! 
• Board members Bonita and Justin have worked to organize and streamline our budget and financial operations.
• And most importantly: we welcomed over 40 girls (at least) over the past two years into our clubs, where they hopefully began to see a place for themselves in the world of tech. 

Does it ever feel like enough? No, and I hope it never does (there’s so much to do!), but I’m so proud to have led this organization the past two years in this way and to get to work alongside this team.

This list is, of course, non comprehensive. There are so many more people contributing and supporting us than included in those bullet points. Sierra, Ciara, Vivian, Leah, Ryan W, Lana, Danielle, Shuai, Emma, Nancy, Jessie, Jenna, Ryan O, Mack, Jaxon, and so many more people have a been a part of these past two years. You helped me grow and learn and I appreciate all of you.

When your efforts don’t feel like enough, when you feel like you’re missing opportunities, when you simply can’t do it all – take a moment to stop and notice what you did do. I’m so glad I did.