In honor of our 5-year milestone, we’re sharing 5 of the many spontaneous and unprompted text messages of appreciation our students have sent us over the years.

Each of these messages was sent by a student to their tutor—or in the case of that last one, to our leadership team when the student was working with a covering tutor. They illustrate the kindness, humility, and spirit of both our students and staff.

On Friday, June 13th, we hosted our second annual Student Celebration at The Center, an important cultural institution located in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Our commitment to building community has really come to life at these fun in-person events where we get to bond with each other over great food and music. The room was full of energy, with current students making up more than half the crowd, joined by their friends, families, and At the Table educators and staff—their biggest fans!

Last November, At the Table introduced a new tradition: a Friendsgiving celebration. Friendsgiving was the idea of our board member Nicole Wong, who hosted the event at her place of work at Paul Hastings LLP’ midtown Manhattan offices.

Nicole was inspired to propose this event because, from her own personal experience with foster care, she knew how important it is for everyone to have a warm, welcoming place to come together around the Thanksgiving holiday. We’re so grateful to Nicole for helping us put together this event, because it was so wonderful to bond with our students over great food (once again from City Beet Kitchens) in an atmosphere of joy and spontaneity. We are determined to make this an annual custom.

We are asking for your support in growing our Emergency Fund to meet the challenges of the coming four years, which may include cuts or delays to the government benefits (such as SNAP) on which so many of our students depend. If our social safety net gets weaker, then our emergency fund will need to be more resilient and more proactive so that students do not need to put their college dreams on hold as a result of our political climate.

In June, we hosted our first-ever Student Celebration. For many students and tutors, this was their first time meeting in person. Tutors and students already meet individually for countless hours of study in virtual rooms, but sharing physical space in this way with other students and each other's families offered us a sense of community that’s hard to replicate online.

We held our Winter Social in January, hoping that it would be our biggest event - ever! We exceeded our expectations with both attendance and donations, with over 60 people joining us and over $12,000 raised. We were honored to have a Chief Deputy from the NYC Public Advocate's office in attendance, and proud to partner with City Beet Kitchens, a program of Project Renewal that provides culinary training for homeless and low-income New Yorkers, to cater the event.

No college student, regardless of their level of preparation, wants to find themselves without the tools to do the work. When one of the students in our college tutoring program, SE, reached out to her tutor last August because her laptop was broken and she was feeling miserable about having to complete her classwork on her phone, we knew what we needed to do.