My daughter recently added a collage of photos of friends and family to her wall surrounding the words “how lucky are we?” (apparently this is trending on all types of social media that this old mama doesn’t see).  I look at it every day and think “YES.  We are so incredibly lucky.”  And when I look around at Meadow - at what we all get to do, who we get to do it with, and who we get to do it for, those words ring true at work too.  We are all so lucky.  And with the Thanksgiving holiday coming up, so grateful too.

At Meadow we have all experienced the impact of higher education.  Some of us were the first in our families to attend college, others followed our parents and sometimes grandparents who preceded us.  Some of us went to schools that were close, others far - and in one case across the world!  Some of us relied heavily on the support of others and aid from our institutions while others had other options available.  But all of us, every one of us, is different because of the places we went, the experiences we had, and the leaders, administrators, professors,  advisors, counselors and professionals at our schools.

Which is perhaps why we all chose this place to work; why it is here, at Meadow, an organization whose mission is to empower students financially and strengthen economic mobility through higher education, that we spend so much of our time. 

We get to wake up thinking about higher education and think about it as we are drifting off to sleep too (and who am I kidding? We sometimes dream about it too).  We get to solve really big problems many days (how do we make payment plans as easy to administer and understand as possible so that more students can afford school?) and really small ones with big impact other days (what is the best subject line for this email so that the maximum number of students open it?). We get to build something new and watch students try it, use it and if they don’t like it we change it and if they do we celebrate it. We get to experiment and learn - sometimes by our success and sometimes by our mistakes.  We get to work in a place where we are encouraged to be our whole selves and where despite the miles between us, we focus on knowing each other better and making the distances feel smaller.  We get to do things we enjoy, with people we like.

And we get to do all of this, for and alongside, more than 150 colleges and universities, representing well over 1M students. This number keeps growing, exponentially, I know that a year from now our impact will be even bigger.  And we get to be part of that too.

We are so grateful to have earned your trust (and we are absolutely determined to always overdeliver so that we deserve it).  We are so grateful for your partnership.  We are so grateful that together we will support more students in their higher education journey.  

How lucky are we?

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