This month marks the one-year anniversary of the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. In a time like no other, PESA and its staff faced the same challenges and hurdles endured by so many around the world: Panic, fear, helplessness and hopelessness. But that was the early weeks of the scourge, and in short order, the organization resolved to meet the challenges head on and do whatever was necessary to continue its mission. One year later, we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished.
In those first days, it was all about sanitizing and disinfecting the office,” recalls PESA’s Executive Director Seymour Amster. “But quickly, understandably,” he says, “there was a growing reluctance on the part of the team to meet with people. When the news began covering the quarantining of cruise ships anchored off the California coast, I thought, this is getting serious. We’re going virtual.”
Senior staff began crafting a plan … for a situation they’d never imagined. For a nonprofit whose core mission is people-based—supporting Teen Court, where proceedings often grow to many dozens of attendees; social workers meeting one-on-one with diverted youth in therapy, mentoring and tutoring sessions; staffers providing educational sessions to classrooms full of students in underserved districts—turning on a dime to a virtual model was daunting, to say the least.
“Right away, we got set up with Zoom, Doxy.me [a secure telehealth portal] and DocuSign,” says Amster, and they were underway.
As for Teen Court, it took some time to be able to convince some judges that a virtual platform would work for Teen Court. But once they tried it and saw firsthand that it worked, they were all in, and on June 8th, the first online proceedings were held. It’s quite a task, wrangling jurors, judges, youthful offenders and their parents and guardians, interpreters and attendees onto a single Zoom call with breakout rooms for deliberations, but ultimately, it worked. And while challenges of the program and the pandemic in general mean overall case numbers are lower than prior years, some individual sessions have drawn record numbers of participants. One recent case with Taft High saw 300 attendees!
On the counseling, tutoring and mentoring front, PESA faced similar challenges of creating a safe and secure environment for one-on-one meetings, and the aforementioned Doxy.me filled the bill. Surprisingly, the program in some ways quickly became even more successful than its pre-pandemic iteration. “We saw a dramatic decrease in appointment cancellations, and a dramatic increase of youth opening up in therapy sessions,” says Amster, who attributes the former to kids not having to rely on working parents to drive them to appointments, and the latter to “meeting” in the comfort of their own homes. “Telehealth is the way of the future,” says Amster, adding that he foresees PESA continuing with its kid-friendly virtual model for one-on-one sessions even after the pandemic.
On the educational front, southland school closures famously resulted in distance learning, which has proven challenging at best. Once again, PESA stepped up to the task by providing a suite of virtual educational sessions adjustable for grades K-12 on topics ranging from anti-bullying to tolerance to environmentalism. In the past year, 124 educational programs have been presented, resulting in nearly a quarter-million hours of student engagement! And PESA’s County of Heroes, a program with an art-contest component aimed at educating youth about the ravages of racism, was specifically created in anticipation of the violence currently being perpetrated against the Asian American community in the wake of pandemic.
Indeed, difficult days have been turned into some pretty crowning achievements for PESA. “We have been able to anticipate what was going to happen this past year,” says Amster, “and meet the needs of the community.” ■
If you’d like more information or to support PESA’s many social and educational initiatives, please contact us.