On June 11th, New Haven Reads hosted its Spring Social virtually through Zoom. The Social, a virtual Trivia Night, brought together 32 volunteers from all different sites.

Natosha Wengreen, NHR’s Outreach Director, said that the Trivia Night was meant to celebrate the end of Spring Semester and allow the volunteers to have a great time.

In addition to being a celebration, Trivia Night also served as an opportunity to connect volunteers that had not had a chance to meet before. Volunteers ordinarily find themselves working with a similar group each week at a specific NHR site, but for Trivia Night, the volunteers were all randomly grouped together in teams. “These teams allowed people to interact with other tutors they might not otherwise meet,” said Julie Yerganian, NHR’s Outreach Assistant.

Overall, the Trivia Night was a terrific success, not only because of the energetic and dedicated volunteers, but also due to Natosha and Julie’s behind the scenes work. Natosha first wondered, “How do you facilitate an event that gets people into teams, and makes it easy for everyone to participate?” To do this, she and Julie worked to “plan how the flow of the evening would go and practice how it would be experienced by the participants.”

Thank you to all of our wonderful volunteers and staff!