Pod People, Participatory Governance during COVID

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These families created a pandemic pod with clear rules & shared childcare. While adults navigated anxiety, their kids called it “the best time of their lives.”

Summary

Bevin Croft and David Weintraub talk about their experience forming a “pod” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Health Hats introduces participatory governance – a concept I’ve studied throughout my life in various contexts, including families, communities, organizations, and healthcare. My history with governance spans from 1968, through college activism, homeschooling my children, living in an intentional community, and working in corporate settings.

The main segment features a conversation with Bevin and David, who formed a COVID-19 support group, or pod, with other families to help one another during the pandemic. They discuss:

• They spontaneously decided to form the pod in May 2020
• Creating formal rules and a written agreement to manage risks and expectations
• The challenges of prioritizing the pod over extended family relationships
• The practical arrangements include shared meals, childcare, and rotating responsibilities
• Their collective approach to virtual schooling for their children
• The difficulties David experienced as a teacher during hybrid learning
• How their children viewed the pod experience as “the best time of their lives” despite adults’ pandemic anxiety
• The lasting bonds their “family of friends” developed and maintained

The pod used tools from Bevin’s work in person-centered practices to create its governance structure. They made decisions based on consensus, with particular attention to accommodate the most cautious member’s concerns. Their experience strengthened existing friendships and created lasting bonds between the families.

Please comment and ask questions:

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Production Team

You know who you are. I’m grateful.

Podcast episode on YouTube

Inspired by and Grateful to

Jan Oldenburg, Nakela Cook, Russ Howerton

Links and references

World Health Network

National Center on Advancing Person-Centered Practices and Systems

Episode

Proem

My advocacy revolves around participatory governance in everything that contributes to a decent quality of life. Participatory governance entails broad involvement, accessible information, transparency, and accountability, leading to trust in decision-making. I’m a lifelong student of governance, having studied it in families, communities, teams, organizations, healthcare, research, and various other settings.

Podcast intro

Welcome to Health Hats, the Podcast. I’m Danny van Leeuwen, a two-legged cisgender old white man of privilege who knows a little bit about a lot of healthcare and a lot about very little. We will listen and learn about what it takes to adjust to life’s realities in the awesome circus of healthcare. Let’s make some sense of all of this.

My Life with Participatory Governance

I’ve watched and participated in governance since 1968, when I was 16, dealing with the Vietnam War draft. I learned that the plumbing of the draft contained laws, written regulations, and unwritten rules, with people making decisions, people moving paper, and massive numbers of kids like me processing through. I wanted to prepare myself, so I went to a church for draft counseling. My counselor invited me to become a counselor, helping men learn the process, make life decisions, and execute those decisions.

I went to college and lived in several group settings. We had to decide how the chores would get done, meals made, bills paid, and transportation arranged. While protesting the Vietnam War, I learned how activists organized rallies, and how the University was run. I gained insights from my professor friends about how change happens. While raising kids and homeschooling, my wife and I experimented with participatory democracy. The same issues arose: chores, money, and who sits where. After that, we lived in an intentional community with four other families on 160 acres. We needed an infrastructure for effective decision-making. We formed a corporation to own the land, created bylaws and a Board of Directors, and established rules for joining and leaving, paying taxes and bills, and behavior guidelines. As a corporate change agent, I was fascinated by governance, managing clinical and IT teams, and participating in mergers. Since then, I have served on several Boards and chaired one. The most impressive governance I’ve seen in sixty years is the World Health Network, PCORI, and the COVID pod created by several family friends.

Forming a Pod

I spoke with Bevin Croft and David Weintraub, who represent four couples with pre-and primary school children, forming a pod to manage their children’s education and lives together while remaining safe. I’ve known Bevin since 2007. We became fast friends; I officiated at her wedding.

Health Hats: When did you give what you were doing a name?

Bevin: We used the name ‘pod’ because that was already like in the consciousness, like on the internet, as people were doing. They were creating pods.

Health Hats: When was the first time you did that? About yourselves?

Bevin: Yeah, we broke the seal. We had been discussing it, and we were all hanging out outside with the kids, which we had been doing regularly. And it was in May, although I don’t remember the exact day. And we were just like. Fuck it.

David: Yeah. We’re like, ‘ This is stupid. ‘ We’re gonna do it. This is dumb. Like, why don’t we just hang out?

Bevin: We just started hanging out, and we never stopped,

David: But there were some slight complications because the Owens moved to Hawaii. I think they moved in mid-April. I think they moved on April 15th or something. And they went for six months, from April 15th to October 15th.

Bevin: It was our very close, tight-knit group of 19 people, five families. Four of the five families decided to do this.

David: Three. No, the Chulas were not part of it.

Bevin: The Owens were before they moved to, that’s right. Yeah. So, when we were like, screw it, we wanna hang out. It was these four families. The fifth family had another family with whom they had already podded; they also podded with another family with whom they shared some childcare arrangements. Yeah. Bennie and Allie. So they didn’t pod with us. So, it was the four. Anyway. Yeah. It was at least these three families. And then a couple of other close families came and went.

Rules

We just started hanging out together. And it became evident very quickly that we also had to establish some rules because, back then, it was as if you were hanging out with us and your parents. Then what if we get each other sick, and then we bring it to, yeah, a parent, and then that parent gets sick and dies, and then we live with the guilt that we were messy? Those were the kinds of stakes and conversations we had to have. So, effectively, we didn’t spend time with our parents.

David: Correct.

Bevin: And hung out with each other. One of the calculations was that for day-to-day sanity and closeness, and this is true. In general, I think your friends are the most important for people.  Not for everybody, but for us. And for a lot of people in our stage of life. Yeah. Having close friends who, with other kids the same age as your kids, was more essential. Yeah. To us socially.

Not easy

David: It was also hard. It was hard for me because my sister lives in Arlington and has two boys. She was upset that we couldn’t see them outside very often. We would go bike riding in a parking lot just to see each other. But we couldn’t hug or be in close contact, we couldn’t be indoors, and that wore on them, and it wore on us a lot. But Bevin is right. We chose that because Jasper and Ivy live five doors down, right? And it just made more sense to have a close, literal, and emotional connection as the main connection at that point. However, it was challenging, as I had numerous tense conversations and non-conversations with my family members about that. Nothing was ever said that was mean or vindictive, but I think everybody felt the tension. Like I felt it, Jessie felt it, my sister felt it, her kids felt it, our kids felt it. So that was really hard. But at the same time, I think that having that pod was really necessary at that point.

Priorities

Health Hats: You just mentioned a specific challenge with it. What was challenging for you?

Bevin: About our arrangements? I loved it. I didn’t have anything. It was clear to us that we wanted to spend time with these people, which was our priority. Everything else about the pandemic was challenging, but the actual pod arrangements themselves were the greatest challenge, as they involved negotiating everyone’s needs.

Health Hats: Needs meaning alone time? Quibbles?

Rules, Contract, Risks

Bevin: No. It was the rules. It was knowing the rules.

David: You should tell about the contract.

Bevin: Yeah. So, it became clear quickly that there was no way we could. You know that. I don’t know the details, but I’m sure it was for families now.

Health Hats: And you couldn’t wing it.

Bevin: We couldn’t wing it. Yeah. We couldn’t just say, ‘ Oh, we’ll find out.‘ It was like, no, it felt like life or death, right? No. We cannot infect the grandparents. No, you can’t just hang out with this other family on the weekend. The stakes back then, before vaccines, when we didn’t know the extent, were that somebody could get sick and die. So, the stakes were very high. We all had to be on the same page about our commitment to this like-pod arrangement.

Tools for Agreement

So, I brought out some tools from work. I still run a national technical assistance center for state governments that supports people with disabilities, called the National Center on Advancing Person-Centered Practices and Systems. It’s essentially a technical Assistance Center funded by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in the Administration for Community Living, which supports states in complying with requirements for making strengths-based, life-affirming, inclusive service plans for people with disabilities. And all kinds of tools have come out of that movement. It started as a disability movement and was adopted by the federal government. But there are all these tools for like families, chosen families, and circles of support to negotiate what a good life is like for a family member with a disability. So, we essentially took some of those tools and modified them to create what our life as a pod needed to be like. And there were all kinds of tools that came in handy. How do we balance quality of life with health and safety and balance multiple people’s priorities and needs? We went through this, spending a couple of hours one day together, all eight adults, while the kids played and mapped out on a big sheet of paper. What are we, and how do we hope to be together? What is the ideal way for us to spend the next ride out, considering COVID-19, together as a community? What are the ways that this could go wrong? What are the ways that this could go wrong? What do we need to do and agree to that will lead to the ideal state? And what do we need not to do that will result in the undesired state? And we matched it all out. And we came up with an agreement together. And we wrote it down and adhered to it. And it really, truly worked beautifully. Yeah.

Health Hats: And how many items are on it?

David: I don’t remember. There were like 20.

Bevin: We divided it into a quadrant.

David: Things to do and things not to do.

Accountability

Bevin: Yeah. They were like, and it got super concrete and specific. It wasn’t like being nice to each other. It was as if we all agreed that if someone is uncomfortable or scared about something, they must tell others. It’s your responsibility to tell other people. We all agree that we would like whoever is least comfortable. The person who is most nervous about something will tend to listen to that person. So it’s not going to be like, oh, Aaron is worried about us going to the movies, but the rest of us want to go to the movies, so we’re gonna go to the movies. It was like, Nope. In that situation, Aaron is still worried about the movies, so that we won’t go. We have to all agree that it’s cool to go to the movies before we go to the movies. So we made decisions like that. We made decisions like, can’t hang out with the grandparents, or if you hang out with the grandparents, then you have to step away from the pod for a week. Like whatever. Yeah. Stuff like that. Like CDC guideline-informed. Sure. Yes. We all took it seriously ’cause it mattered that we had the support network. And I don’t know if we ever got sappy about it, but I think we abided by it because it was really important to us to have our friends be a physical part of our lives.

Bevin: We started the conversation by asking, ‘Why does it matter?’ Why does being together matter? Why does being in this community with each other matter? There’s no way we could have done it if we hadn’t been friends already.

David: It’s true.

Bevin: The pod stories about people just like podding up, like

David: with randos (random people).

Bevin: How convenient.

David: Why haven’t there been more movies about that? Probably because we want to forget that our kids will make them.

How are You Different?

Health Hats: How are you different because you experienced that?

Bevin: For me, I think it was a pretty healing and powerful experience. I came from a pretty chaotic family life with a pretty disjointed family not a lot of extended family. And so, for me, I think it was lovely and affirming. And I got to experience a family I would have loved to have had as a kid.

Health Hats: You did it. I get that feeling when I travel. I went to Cuba. I did it. You know what I mean? David, how about you?

David: It was harder, maybe a little harder for me than it might have been for Bevin. Again, mainly because. Bevin has a bunch of siblings, but they don’t live close, and I don’t think any of our pod crew had other, like, physically close and very close family members except for Maggie’s mom. But again, it was really hard to prioritize literally and physically the pod over, like, my actual family. And that’s so

Health Hats: Was there learning in that?

David: No, but there was no learning in that. However, I suppose it was a learning experience; there was no ‘Oh, and we’ve all learned a great lesson about X, Y, Z.’ It wasn’t stated or explicit. I think it made me realize, like Bevin, that having a close and loving community is really important. Honestly, it also gave me a greater appreciation for my sister, whom I missed a lot, and my nephews and my brother-in-law, whom I also missed a lot. I wouldn’t make any other decision than the ones we made, but that was a real challenge. I also wasn’t great at communicating. I was, I think, better at expressing this internally or externally to my sister. Yeah. Okay. Externally. Yeah. I wasn’t saying, ‘Sarah, I’m going to, I’m going to catch up with this group of friends, and I’m really sorry.’ I know you’re probably feeling alone, and I’m not with you right now. I avoided that conversation, but I think that since I. The restrictions have come down. She’s also a nurse, so she was, to some degree, understanding because she was in the thick of the healthcare crisis itself.

But I don’t know. I just feel like my relationship with my sister has changed. The crisis, per se, ended better now. And that’s mostly because I realized how central that relationship is, and my relationship with my nephews, my brother-in-law, and my kids’ relationships with their cousins is really important.

Fortunately, that relationship has only grown stronger since Covid, and perhaps the absence makes the heart grow fonder. So maybe that. Paradoxically. Made the relationship stronger. That was a challenge for me. And yeah, it was like, I felt lucky. I still feel lucky. I also felt like I was repressing a lot at the moment. Like I feared, mostly. And, the anxiety, it’s just it was a time of high anxiety.

Health Hats: Do you have a baseline of fairly high anxiety?

David: Yeah, I do. And I think I keep it on the surface. It’s always right there. I do that on purpose. So I don’t have to feel that there’s something in the corner that I can’t see. I know that it’s there. It’s right in front of my face.

Meals

Health Hats: How’d you eat?

Bevin: We shared a ton of meals. We had Taco Tuesday. Which Ivy called Taco Tuesday night? On the regular, we probably shared, I don’t know. 3, 2, 3 meals a week. Yeah. Get together in different combinations with one another.

Childcare

Bevin: Importantly, we hired a childcare provider.

David: Oh yeah. Was that what started in September, because that was when school started together?

Bevin: And we hired her to be with the kids.

Health Hats: So, how did you integrate her into the pod?

Bevin: We figured out her situation and explained our parameters. And she was able to agree to them.

David: to the best of her knowledge.

Bevin: I think it was fine. We all interviewed her all together.

Health Hats. That must have been a little intimidating.

Traveling Together

David: That’s right. I think there’s more to the story here, which is that. The summer was excellent. I remember that summer being good because. Beautiful weather. We can be outside; you can be socially distanced. Yeah. And, still, have a great time. We went to Vermont that summer in a house that we still rent.

Bevin: Oh, that was awesome. That was the first trip. We’ve done it every year since. We’ve done it every year since. All of us went to Vermont. And Benny and Ally came to that, too. They did. That is correct. They slotted in with us. They were quarantined for a week in their pod and came to Vermont.

David: We were four. It was four families. That’s right.

Bevin: And that Vermont trip was in July, right? We took a week and went to Vermont together, and it was one of the happiest weeks of March. It was a lot of fun. It was just. Incredible. It was so joyous. We were so tight from what we’ve been through together. Yeah. We were thrilled to spend our vacation together.

David: In a beautiful spot.

Bevin: In a beautiful spot. It was, yeah. We’re going back there again this summer. We went there last summer.

David: Yep. And so this summer was wonderful. Yeah. And then September happened, and that’s

when we got the help. Because all of us. Have you had work, and the kids had school? It was a very strange arrangement, but we made it work.

School and Working

So, Bevin and Dave worked at their house, which, as I mentioned, is five houses away from ours. Meanwhile, all the kids were at our place. I don’t want to mention her name on the recording, but our nanny, for lack of a better term, was essentially in charge of managing all the kids’ Zoom sessions since Jasper and Audrey were in second grade. Ivy was in. It must have been kindergarten. And Edie was still in preschool while Ellie was in kindergarten. And so they all had their own Zoom meetings to attend. And I’m a teacher, and I had to do this too. And, but I will say God bless all the teachers who had to do the best they could in a really shitty situation.

Bevin: And our nanny’s main role for most of the day was to administer the Zooms, make sure the kids could get on, and keep paying attention.

David: And then there were snacks, lunch, more snacks, and lunch, etc. We had a slight rotation, so I was in my basement teaching on Zoom all day. And then there would be, like, each grown-up would take one lunch period. I think.

Bevin: No, she would do lunch, but she would leave at 2:30, and then we would take turns. Take turns taking care of all five kids. That’s right. Somewhere. Or doing something with them from 2:30 to 5. That’s right. And each parent would take a kid. Yes. We would rotate days. Those were cool. I remember taking them on different little adventures right after school, and there was one. I took them to Rock Meadow in Belmont. All five of them. It was probably November, a really cold, weird day. And the sun was just going down. It was like the sun was starting to set, and we were wandering around Rock Meadow, and this stag burst out of the bushes and just started running towards us. He reared up on his hind legs and then kept running. That’s cool. And I was standing there with these five kids. We were all just in awe. And it, I don’t know. And I’ll never forget that kind of moment—those unexpected adventures. There were also some horrible slogs after school.

Tough Times as a Teacher

David: Yeah, those after-school moments or hours were tough. I think that we got into the rhythm. I will also say that it became harder as the summer turned to fall and fall turned to winter. And I had a really, hard winter, like a really hard winter. And then, I went back to school right after—winter break. So, on January 3rd, I was back at school and felt bad on two levels. One was that I had one less adult to do this. I didn’t have a choice. Like my job was back in session, so I had to go. And then I felt terrible because just when I started to feel okay with Zoom teaching, we went back to school. And they put us in a hybrid situation, where I taught four or five kids in person and the rest of the class on Zoom.

Every day, I went home feeling like the worst teacher in the world. Like I just couldn’t, I couldn’t do this.

Health Hats: My son Ruben had first graders. He said it was soul-sucking.

David: It was soul-sucking. It is the light way of putting it. I still resent the fullness and anger towards the administration of my district because they, in their instincts, were right. Let’s get these kids back into school. But it was impossible. They gave us an impossible task. Like I said, every day, I went home feeling like I was the worst teacher in the world. And everybody was feeling that way, too. However, there wasn’t enough community at that moment for us to say, ‘Oh, I guess everybody feels this way,’ because none of the administration wanted to acknowledge it. ’cause that would mean that, okay, now something’s broken. We need to do something about it. But I think that was really, incredibly hard. And again, the summer was wonderful, but winter was incredibly challenging for me.

Kids Loved It

Bevin: Our kids, mind you. I think yours too. They remember those. They remember that year. That’s right. The best year of their lives. They think back on it so fondly. I remember I was. This summer, we were hanging out and going around the table, asking if you could live in any decade or historical period, which would you choose? And we all, oh, the sixties, like the whatever time of the dinosaurs. And my son was like, COVID times back when we were in the pod.

Health Hats: We were homeschoolers. And there are some similarities. And it wasn’t just our kids. We homeschool together with some others. And so I understand we came from the point of view we’re we’ll be damned if we’re sending our 6-year-old to a full-time job. That didn’t make any sense to us. And the kids. As you spoke with Simon and Ruben, they have a good memory, which is not about the time of tragedy, but I understand. I get where they’re coming from. Yeah. The kids are coming from.

David: It’s all, it’s also funny, so two, two things remind me, I’m reminded of two things. Number one, people who didn’t have kids thought that Covid was like the greatest time. Some of them, yeah.

Bevin: My siblings, who don’t have kids, had a great time.

David: Some of my colleagues who don’t have kids are like, “Oh my God, that was the best. Like we make bread.” Exactly. There’s so much time, all this time. And I’m like, oh man, we had no time. We had no time. Demoralizing. And then the second thing that made me think about it is that now I’m having a mental lapse. There are two things, but I’ll come back to the second one. The main thing is that, oh, the second thing is this: that students’ kids, like, ’cause I teach high school, we have ’em do a reflection essay at the end of senior year, and for the last three years, there’ve been essays about Covid times and, oh man, I’m so mad about this. All the kids in the class like to be with a person. There isn’t a single person who says anything different. COVID was amazing. I wanna go back to Covid. It was so awesome. I didn’t have to go to school. I could log on and not have to go because my teachers couldn’t require me to put my camera on, and I could play video games the entire day. And I did. People in education circles were like, these kids are traumatized. These kids have needs that require us to be very gentle when discussing this, as it might retraumatize them or cause other issues. And not a single student that I’ve ever read in a reflection from or heard from has said anything remotely close to trauma. They said, ‘That was the best; I want to do that again.’ What Jasper said, and it just makes me feel such a disconnect ’cause all of the adults that I was working with in my profession were like, these kids are so traumatized, and we have to treat them gently, and we have to make sure there’s a lot of self-reflection in what people think about other people.

Bevin: I mean that they’re pretty good data, you know. Mental health outcomes for kids. Yeah. Mental outcomes for children and learning. No, I know, but I get your point. I think the release of day-to-day responsibilities for many people was interesting. Yeah. Perhaps we don’t discuss that enough.

Belated Introductions

Health Hats: But I want to do intros again. Okay. So, who are you?

David: My name is Dave Weintraub. I live in Watertown, Massachusetts. I have two daughters, Audrey, who’s now 12 and was seven at the start of the pandemic. And Edie, now nine, was four at the start of the pandemic. And my partner is Jessica Middlebrook. And she’s with the kids right now.

Bevin: I’m Bevin Croft, and I live in Watertown. My partner is David Pereira. Not to be confused with David Weintraub, I have two kids, Jasper, who is 11 now, and Ivy, who is nine. I’m a policy researcher by day I work for a nonprofit. And yeah, we’re representing this family, we call it. A family of friends that is still incredibly close. Yeah. We text each other on a text chain pretty much every day, continuously, at least 10 times.

David: And I always feel bad I can’t respond ’cause I have terrible cell reception in my, at school, in my school.

Bevin: So yeah. We are part of a community that formed long before Covid but was strengthened and grew in some areas. Some new level of friendship. Yeah. During the pandemic.

David: Yeah. We’ve known each other for 20 years, and I’ve been friends with Maggie, who’s been in the pod since college; we were in the same dorm hall in the freshman year of college. And so those connections go back really far. And then another family that was not technically in the pod, Benny and Allie, like I’ve known Benny since I was a baby, ’cause our parents were friends. The connections in this friend’s family are truly deep, special, and unique. I don’t know how many people have such close, long-standing friendships that are still close. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Bevin: We’re very lucky. Yeah, that’s right. Very lucky.

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Reflection

I love that the kids thought COVID time was the best, not an episode of high anxiety. Bevin and David’s story reinforces that governance is never-ending work, whether a pod or a nation. Leaders and participants change, culture morphs, communication improves or degrades, and power dynamics alter. I pick and choose what governance to participate in. My wife participates in town governance. I’m involved in the governance of my family, PCORI, and several committees and teams. I usually drop out when governance is poor, and I can’t impact governance without devoting more than 25% of my allotted time. I’ve learned that it’s not worth it. Trust is key. It’s currency. Negotiation and transparency depend on trust. These days I’m fascinated by AI governance.  More to come.

Podcast Outro

I host, write, and produce Health Hats the Podcast with assistance from Kayla Nelson, Leon, and Oscar van Leeuwen. Music from Joey van Leeuwen. I’m grateful to you who have the critical roles as listeners, readers, and watchers. Subscribe and contribute. If you like it, share it. See you around the block.

 

 

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The views and opinions presented in this podcast and publication are solely my responsibility and do not necessarily represent the views of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute®  (PCORI®), its Board of Governors, or Methodology Committee. Danny van Leeuwen (Health Hats)