In the spring of 2020, everything changed.
Everything changed first over COVID-19. People worked from home, others lost their jobs. Overnight, our plans changed. Our needs changed. And the organizations we counted on to meet those needs – they had to change as well.
And something else was happening too. The same week North Carolina closed its schools, a woman named Breonna Taylor was shot and killed by police in Louisville. Two months later, George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. And as people flooded the streets in protest, once again, we realized things had to change.
It’s now been three years since that spring. What have we learned from our experience? What lessons have we taken away? What changes have we made? And which of those changes will last?
“Three Years” is a series by 97.9 The Hill’s Aaron Keck – looking back on our memories and lessons learned from our collective experience, drawn from conversations with numerous government officials, nonprofit heads, scholars and thought leaders in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro community.
Click here for the entire 15-part series.
Listen to Chapter 9:
Chapter 9: The Shift
When I ask nonprofit leaders how the events of 2020 changed their sense of mission, some speak about the racial justice movement and a greater commitment to equity – but they also keep coming back to COVID-19, and how that experience changed them in unexpected and unpredictable ways.
“I think we are much more aware of the isolation and loneliness our recipients experience,” says Rachel Bearman of Meals on Wheels. “The majority of the focus of our service was on meal delivery. It takes the time and attention and focus and funding. But one of the most important aspects of what we do is that personal connection.”
You don’t notice how important something is until it isn’t there. At Meals on Wheels, they discovered they weren’t only giving food to people – they were giving human interaction.
“We started this volunteer phone caller program,” Bearman says, “and it became incredibly important to both parties: both the volunteers who were calling and the recipients who were receiving them. And we surveyed all of our recipients and asked them: ‘even when we return to daily hot meal delivery, are you interested in receiving phone calls?’ And over 70 percent of recipients said yes. Like, that was an incredibly meaningful connection. That’s something that we need more of in our life, that we don’t necessarily have access to on our own.”
Turns out, organizations like Meals on Wheels play many roles in our community – not just the specific service they provide, but also the opportunity for people to connect with each other.
“Our volunteers were very worried about coming back, yet at the same time, they wanted to talk to the people that they had been hanging out with for years,” says Richard Turlington of Orange County Habitat for Humanity. “That part of our mission – the building of the community and the building of relationships within the community – seems that much more important.
“I even remember once, when we first started getting back…I was trying to get somebody to get something done and he just looked at me and he was like, ‘we’re gonna get to it, Richard, but let us just talk for a little bit. We haven’t seen each other in a while.’ And I was like, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I forgot.’”
“And that is in our mission statement,” adds Habitat CEO Jennifer Player. “We bring people together to build homes, community and hope. Right? It’s the ‘bringing people together’ that we weren’t able to do.”
Over at Kidzu Children’s Museum, CEO Jamie DeMent Holcomb says COVID-19 altered their mission in many ways – beginning with the way they reach people in the first place.
“We’ve always had a website,” she says, “but this virtual component was never a core mission for us. It wasn’t something that we (thought) we had to put so much time and energy into. And now it’s like a whole other leg of the museum. The virtual museum is almost as important as the physical museum. And we see that only growing in the future.”
But the pandemic also had a long-term impact on the exhibits and activities you’ll find at Kidzu itself.
“We actually did a conference with the International Organization of Museums,” says Holcomb, “talking about (how) we need to put public health programming in museums…you know, we’ve done it a little bit here and there in the past, but mostly only in science museums – and that’s not going to cut it anymore. We need to talk about public health issues in every single museum setting. Because this was not the last pandemic that we’re going to deal with. And so it needs to be something that becomes part of the dialogue at Kidzu.”
That turned into an exhibit called Communities for Immunity.
“And it’s been incredible,” she says. “We’ve had these teddy-bear clinics and these little kids are getting to come in – and they put on their little doctor coat, they get the syringe, (and) they give the vaccine to their teddy bear. Which helps them understand the process, become less afraid, and it makes them much more comfortable when they go in and get the vaccine themselves.”
But while the pandemic was nudging some organizations to reimagine their missions, for others it simply reinforced the urgent needs they were already serving.
“What it highlighted for me was just the pain in the underserved communities, in the minority communities, in the communities that are living at or below the poverty level,” says Delores Bailey of EmPOWERment, Inc.
Bailey even saw that pain among the people she worked with every day.
“There was a woman on the business call that we were having every week,” she says, “who happened to say, ‘I’m about to lose my apartment.’ She was running her own business, but she was about to lose her apartment. And I said, ‘well, where do you live?’ She said, ‘in Orange County.’ I said, ‘where specifically?’ We were able to connect her with the Emergency Housing Assistance Fund.”
But while the pandemic drove home the importance of the work Bailey was already doing, it also pushed her toward change as well – first, in the form of greater collaboration with other organizations.
“COVID was a time for us to really come together and work with one another,” she says. “We had to start working together around housing, all of the nonprofits, where many helped bring people to that emergency housing assistance. Like no other time. It was major the way we started collaborating.”
But Bailey’s mission also changed in other ways. I know her as a housing advocate primarily, but she also works to support local businesses – and I notice her talking about them more than I ever had before.
“Even the basic kinds of things,” she says. “Hair salons couldn’t do hair. A fitness expert in our building, Mr. Jason Davis, he couldn’t help people stay in shape.”
“Do you think you’re talking more about businesses now, versus housing, than you would have two years ago?” I ask.
“Absolutely,” she says. “Because people started losing their jobs. Before, I didn’t have to worry about Jason and his business. His business was fine. I didn’t worry about the salons. Their people were coming. But as soon as folks couldn’t come to their business anymore, then I was worried. How’s she gonna pay her mortgage? How’s she gonna do this? Yes, this disease, the pandemic, and the situation with George Floyd, have pulled the bandaid off of a lot of minority businesses. I couldn’t get to them fast enough, Aaron. If I’d known that there was money out there, if I could have had them register with the state so they didn’t have to go under and they could have applied for PPP (loans), we absolutely would have been there. But who knew? Who knew how bad it really was?
“But hopefully we can fix it. Hopefully we can help those that have continued to hold on. Maybe we can bring them to the resources and they can sustain their businesses.”
That hopefulness amidst the challenges is something I hear from almost every nonprofit leader. At Kidzu, for instance, Jamie Holcomb says she’s hopeful that their online presence will reach more people.
“If we can solve rural broadband issues – which is something that we absolutely have to – we will be able to get our services into every single county in North Carolina, into childcare centers, churches, libraries,” she says. “And I think that will help expand the mission of inclusivity, on a level we’d never been able to do before.”
At Meals on Wheels, Rachel Bearman says being forced to pivot made them more aware of how much was possible.
“As a small nonprofit, we were very focused on what we do and how we do it, staying in that lane,” she says. “When COVID came, and we had to completely upend and change everything that we were doing as an organization – it opened up a world of opportunity, that we could do anything.
“If we could change an entire service model, that we had been doing for 44 years, in one week’s worth of time, then – we could really think differently and broadly about what we could do in the community, and what our role could be, and how we could best serve our seniors.”
“What’s something that you think might come out of that?” I ask.
“Better service for our recipients,” she says. “The type of food they have access to. What do they want to be eating? What type of meals? How many do they really need? What kind of dent or impact are we making, in food insecurity and (the) nutritional needs of older adults? (And) the other side would be on social isolation and loneliness. What type of programs would really have an impact? How we can better connect our seniors, who are alone and isolated, in community?”
But more than anything, COVID-19 has forced us to be more aware of the many struggles we’re collectively facing, struggles that got exacerbated by the pandemic itself. It’s also forced us to be more aware of the role of nonprofits in addressing not just the needs they were created to address, but many others as well, all at once.
Like at Kidzu, where the focus now is on mental health and the importance of collaboration.
“We’re doing lots of mindfulness activities,” says Jamie Holcomb. “We’re doing these rock stacking activities, things to help them understand that – when you get really stressed out, and totally overwhelmed by something, and you get really scared, that sometimes the best thing to do is just take a break and breathe. A lot of what we’re doing is teaching children the value of space and mindfulness. And slowly coming back to that idea of collaborative space, and collaborative play, and helping them figure out how to engage on their own terms. Rather than us saying ‘do it this way.’”
I’m curious. “That sense of wonder that you see in kids, (the way) the light bulb pops on when they’re at a museum – do kids experience that differently now?” I ask. “Or is it similar to the way it was?
“I think it’s slower,” she says. “That sounds more pessimistic than I want to sound, but I do think that those light bulb moments are a little slower to come, just because I think it takes a little bit longer right now to be comfortable in a space. Because a lot of those ‘aha’ moments, those light bulb moments, come when you’re engaging with someone else.
“And you still see it. You see it all the time. Our Gravitron is a whole bunch of tubes and balls, (something) you can do all by yourself – and watching children figure out how that goes, and watching them understand that if they climb the treehouse, they can put balls in there, they can go faster and they can make louder noises – those moments, they happen just as quickly and just as often. But it’s the other moments, where you’re watching kids come together and collaborate – that’s slower, because there’s not spontaneous interaction happening.
“But we’ll get there.”
Click here for the entire 15-part series.
Featured photo: Aaron Keck, masked, with Delores Bailey in October 2021. We welcomed guests back into the 97.9 The Hill studio on May 22, 2020, for the first time since March 27 – but because it took several months to understand the importance of masking, it wasn’t until July 23 that we started requiring masks. We lifted our mask requirement on June 2, 2021 – only to reinstate it on August 4, as the Delta variant was surging. Our second mask requirement lasted until March 3, 2022.
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