Page 32 - BusinessWest May 26, 2020
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 “I’d say it’s expanded into three dimensions — now, soon, and someday,” Nortonsmith told Busi- nessWest. “It’s a matter of reinventing the organi- zation day-to-day, with partial attention on what’s happening now, while creating how we want to be tomorrow, and a significant effort toward how it will be someday.”
With that, she spoke for every nonprofit man- ager in Western Mass. All of them are juggling more balls at once, and all of them are coping with now, tomorrow, and someday — all while trying to keep clients and staff safe. And, like Nor-
“I’d say it’s expanded into
three dimensions — now, soon, and someday. It’s a matter of reinventing the organization day- to-day, with partial attention on what’s happening now, while creating how we want to be tomorrow, and a significant effort toward how it will be someday.”
tonsmith, they’re finding the work both exhilarat- ing and exhausting.
As the pandemic begins to ease somewhat, the nonprofit managers we spoke with are looking, in some ways, to turn back the clock to 2019, before
the pandemic — to when staff members could work in the office; when they could stage large, in-per- son fundraising events; when people could come to them for services; when the juggling act had fewer dimensions and a lower degree of difficulty.
But they also know that, in many respects, they can’t simply turn the clock back, and don’t nec- essarily want to.
Indeed, as with busi-
nesses across every sector
of the economy, nonprof-
its have learned new ways
of doing things during the
pandemic, out of neces-
sity. At the Northampton
Survival Center, and at a
similar facility across the
Connecticut River, the
Amherst Survival Center,
delivery of food to clients in need was done spar- ingly, if at all, before COVID. Then, just over a year ago, it became the model for operating, along with curbside service.
Delivery and curbside is a more expensive and labor-intensive model, said both Nortonsmith and Lev Ben-Ezra, her counterpart in Amherst. But moving forward, it will certainly become part of the way clients are served, because it allows these agencies to serve more people and serve them more effectively.
Dexter Johnson says the Y’s overriding challenge is to bring membership back up to something approaching pre- pandemic levels.
“It’s been a strategic goal of ours for some time to provide more food to more people and to increase access for people in a variety of ways,” Ben-Ezra explained. “And we’ve known for some time that transportation is an enormous issue; we had been incrementally increasing delivery to seniors in the months before COVID, but didn’t
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