Finding Play During a Global Pandemic
by Jeremy Hoffner
UNSTRUCTURED, FREE PLAY is easily lost these days unless you actively work to prioritize it in your routine. As a college student, the rigors of school work, internships, extracurriculars, family, and friends mean that my time is very limited for engaging in activities like play. Oftentimes I find that any remaining free time I have in my schedule is spent in static ways like watching television or playing video games because my mind is too tired to occupy anything else. That all changed in March as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the course of one week, I transitioned from in-person classes at school to virtual classes from my childhood bedroom. The extracurricular activities that I was involved in became virtual. The internships that I was researching and to which I was applying for the summer quickly went from in-person to online. In a very short period of time, my life shifted from the chaos of college to sitting in front of screens all day, trying to emulate the in-person experience as much as possible. One aspect of my life that changed the most as a result of the pandemic was my search for a summer internship. I study Political Science, History, and English
at Johns Hopkins University. Before the pandemic, I was searching far and wide for an opportunity to work in a professional field relating to one of my academic interests. However, most businesses, non-profits, and government agencies decided to scale back their summer internship programs or cancel them altogether. Almost all organizations shifted their summer programs online. Many of the leads that I had evaporated quickly. I had applied to dozens of opportunities to only hear back from organizations that their programs would not be happening. One night in mid-May, after I had finished my spring semester school work, I was browsing my university’s internship postings for a way to get involved. I came upon a non-profit organization called Let’s Play America. I was quite tired and quickly grazed over the mission and goals of the nonprofit. I saw they were working to bring free play back to people of all ages. That stuck with me. The next morning, I did more extensive research into LPA and submitted my resume for an internship opening. Having the opportunity to speak with Pat Rumbaugh, the Play Lady and founder of LPA, later that week solidified my interest in helping her. I did not realize when I accepted the position that I would be able to have
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such an immediate impact on the organization and that I would recapture my love for play. The breadth of work that Let’s Play America has accomplished this summer has been quite exhaustive. I have gotten to explore a wide array of media sources that write about play, from parenting blogs to health magazines, and connect them with Pat. I have done social media research into ways to increase the number of followers that our social media accounts have and develop a more consistent content brand. LPA has painted numerous hopscotch boards across Ta-
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