A Day in the Life with Founder Nily Samara
If you were to ask Ballet Bridges Founder Nily Samara what a typical day looks like for her, she'll tell you honestly that there isn't one, and she wouldn't have it any other way. That unpredictability is kind of the whole thing. It's what makes running Ballet Bridges feel alive instead of like a routine.
She usually starts her mornings with emails, which sounds mundane until you realize what's actually in her inbox on any given day. Someone reaching out to donate, a school asking about starting a chapter, a sponsor with a question, a partner organization checking in. She works through all of it before heading to school, because on top of everything she's still a student, and then dances when she has class, which is its own kind of grounding in the middle of a full day.
The afternoons tend to fill up fast. There are weekly meetings with the national team, with chapter leaders, with the communications side of things, and sessions dedicated to building out resources for the ambassador program, reviewing forms that ambassadors have submitted, and making sure everyone who's showing up for Ballet Bridges actually feels supported in doing that. Quarterly, she gets on calls with the broader ambassador community, and scattered throughout are the conversations that don't follow any schedule: a new potential sponsor, a partner she's been hoping to connect with, someone who just needs to talk through what Ballet Bridges could look like at their school.
On the days she teaches, something shifts. Nily's background is in ballet, and the style she keeps coming back to is adaptive ballet, the version of the form that doesn't assume anything about who the student is or what their body can do. She loves the challenge of taking something that can feel rigid and traditional and finding the joy inside it, the version that works for everyone in the room.
Once a month, she makes the run to the P.O. Box. Whatever has been mailed in gets hauled home, unboxed, sorted, cleaned, and logged so Ballet Bridges can actually measure what it's giving. Then it either gets shipped out through the post office or she drives it over herself to wherever it's going locally.
The heaviest lift, though, is chapter support. Every school and university has its own way of doing things, its own requirements, its own personalities, and starting a new chapter means learning all of that from scratch and building something that actually holds. These chapters aren't just hosting events or fundraising either, but they're running real dance classes, in person, regularly, and keeping those programs going safely.
The creative work is what she looks forward to most: the days when she gets to update the website, dream up a new program, or put together something that makes it easier for a volunteer to do their job well. Those are the hours that fly by. Most days she gives anywhere from a couple of hours to six, and on weekends, especially when she's deep in donation processing or writing a grant, full days aren't unusual at all. But what actually keeps her in it is simpler than any of that. It's being in a classroom and watching a kid figure something out, or dropping off a box of shoes and seeing someone's face light up, or a photo that lands in her messages later of kids crowded around a donation, genuinely excited. Those moments don't need to be explained. They're just the reason.
Ballet Bridges grew from a single idea into something with real reach, with chapters, ambassadors, programs, donations, and classes happening in places that might never have had them otherwise. Nily is in the middle of all of it, every day, in ways big and small, and she'll tell you that's exactly where she wants to be.