Collaboration a byword of nonprofits during pandemic

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Every business and nonprofit organization has been affected by the pandemic that took the world by storm nearly a year ago, and each of them has had to make sacrifices or change the way they do business and interact with their clients.

But one thing many local nonprofit leaders have said helped them through the chaos of COVID-19 was collaboration, the likes of which haven’t been seen in this region before.

“What I’ve witnessed is our nonprofit community has to rely on one another a little bit more,” said Karen Zandi, newly elected president of the Council of Agency Executives and president and CEO of Mary Cariola Center. “We’re asking one another for advice; we’re asking one another to compare notes. Moving forward with the vaccine, we’re working cooperatively with different organizations in the community that had not come together previously.”

Zandi said she expects those new, collaborative relationships to be sustained well into the future as a result.

“The phrase ‘we’re in this together’ means something very different now,” she said. “It’s more intense.”

Zandi’s team at Mary Cariola, a local nonprofit that serves individuals with disabilities, has pulled together to ensure the organization’s hundreds of clients and residents continue to receive the high-quality services and programs they are accustomed to. And decisions had to be made quickly.

“Things you would typically spend time on like building consensus around decision-making, nope. Decisions had to be made very quickly,” Zandi said. “You rely on trust of one another as team members, that everybody’s got their role and they’re going to do it and do it well and not let you down.”

Early on in the pandemic, information about the virus changed on a daily — and sometimes hourly — basis, so good communication became that much more important. A COVID hotline was set up at Mary Cariola, and the staff developed an underlying theme they called Cariola Cares.

“The way we moved forward was focusing on the constituents we serve, including our staff, using our leadership team to assess what do people need and then where do we get the resources to meet those needs,” Zandi said.

Technology quickly stood out as a critical asset in managing the turmoil caused by the virus, as well as keeping constituents informed and keeping school open.

“We distributed over 100 iPads to families who had nothing other than their mom’s cell phone,” Zandi recalled. “If you can imagine a single-parent family with multiple kids, everybody’s fighting over the cell phone to try to do school. We needed to put technology into the hands of our neediest families so that they could continue virtual learning.”

Mary Cariola was able to secure nearly $500,000 to help with COVID expenses. The Community Crisis Fund that was put together by the United Way of Greater Rochester Inc. and Rochester Area Community Foundation helped the agency get technology into the hands of the right people, Zandi said, and last fall’s ROC the Day initiative brought in another $35,000.

Mary Cariola will continue on the path toward improved technology as a result of the pandemic, Zandi said.

“The technology tools we’ve established for our families and staff, and good practices in our residences — we’ve learned what works and shouldn’t go away,” she added.

The YWCA of Rochester and Monroe County similarly has had to rely on technology to accomplish its goals since the start of the pandemic.

“Some of the things we had to do were make sure we can maintain that level of quality, working with clients and residents through a virtual format,” said YWCA President and CEO Myra Henry, who joined the organization midway through the pandemic last year. “That meant that we had to make sure that our staff had the necessary equipment and technology to support their work remotely because we could no longer see visitors or go out to residents to visit face-to-face. We didn’t have it before because most of our work was done face-to-face. That was quite a feat that we had to take on.”

That meant staff training and finding funding where little existed. The YWCA put out a COVID crisis appeal, which infused the organization with much-needed funds and the community stepped up with in-kind donations of health and safety products, food and more. And the YWCA’s annual Empowering Women luncheon, its largest fundraiser, moved to an Empowering Women Sponsorship that helped the organization through the second half of the year.

“As important as all of that was, our next concern that we really have to think about is the sustainability. We had an influx of funds, our community stepped up, as it always does here in Rochester in times of crisis. But what is happening here in our community is the economy is changing and there are so many unknowns. How that’s going to affect philanthropy we don’t know yet,” Henry said.

She noted that what YWCA has learned throughout the pandemic is how to think differently and outside the box to continue to offer quality care and support.

“We’ve learned how to shift and pivot without losing focus of our mission to provide quality services,” she added.

The pandemic also has underscored the significant inequalities in the community.

“We work with families in our community to fight these inequalities, but the pandemic really showed us there is so much work to do, especially working with the types of clients we work with,” Henry said, referring to the many underserved women and families the organization assists.

The Ibero-American Action League also works with and in neighborhoods that are underserved. President and CEO Angelica Perez-Delgado said one thing she and her team discovered during the pandemic was the lack of resources in Spanish. Ibero did a lot of translating during the first few months, she said.

“I remember being home at one point and saying, I have to help other organizations figure out how to effectively reach our people,” Perez-Delgado said. “Ibero has to help other organizations be inclusive, have information in native language for our population. In hard times you know who you need to be and who we need to continue to be is a strong advocate for inclusion of people that do not speak English in our community.”

At the onset of the pandemic, Ibero quickly realized that virtual programs would not work for many of its services.

“We had to quickly figure out for those services we were going to move to virtual, how do we still respond quickly and keep our connection with the community,” Perez-Delgado recalled. “But those programs that are deeply rooted in community work, they’re boots on the ground programs.”

And that was scary, she acknowledged, because so little was known about the virus and it was imperative that she keep her staff safe.

“A lot of them were out in the community distributing masks and food, checking up on clients,” Perez-Delgado said. “The first month when we started to call people, about 10 percent of our caseloads had disconnected phones. Usually those things weren’t real barriers because people just got on the bus or got in their car and showed up at our building. When we didn’t have that option any longer, it became apparent that we needed to reach our people in some programs in a very different way. In the first three months we knocked on over 400 doors of people that received services from us.”

Ibero, like many grassroots organizations, never had the infrastructure to offer virtual programs and services, Perez-Delgado noted. And she was surprised at how many of her own staff members did not have internet at home.

“How do I provide internet in my staff’s homes? How do I provide them cell phones so they’re not using their personal cell phones? How do I provide them the laptops to continue to do their work? When we began to shut down we needed a lot of equipment to be able to create this virtual space,” she said. “We purchased a lot of cell phones. Thank god for United Way and Finger Lakes Performing Provider System, who provided us over 30 laptops. I know Xerox gave us quite a bit of equipment.”

Perez-Delgado said one of the things she learned during all of this is that Ibero is not really a brick and mortar organization.

“Which I knew, but I know it deeply now that we are not bound by the walls of the building,” she said. “We are truly a grassroots and community-driven organization. What I learned was that for us to have pulled off what we have in the last 10 months we need infrastructure to support our frontline workers.”

For the Golisano Autism Center, which opened a few short months before the first cases of COVID-19 hit the region, infrastructure was not nearly as much of an issue as attempting to engage a clientele whose engagement and interactions with others are at the core of its existence.

“What we’re finding is that the greatest barrier for people with autism is not being able to access 100 percent in-person services and supports,” said GAS Director Beth Ciardi. “The virtual aspect is not the best delivery of services and supports for people with autism. Isolation is not good for people with autism, and here we are being told to isolate. It’s really detrimental to the success of people who are trying to move forward.”

Ciardi is herself the parent of a 14-year-old with autism, so when schools and gathering places were closed and she was working from home, she also was engaging as a one-to-one aide to her son.

“There are 12 local agency and service providers that provide services underneath our roof that quickly had to pivot and determine what was the best way that they could still support their families and deliver the services that people with autism need so badly,” Ciardi said. “It was a whirlwind. And a lot of getting creative.”

GAC has a helpline that is open five days a week, which serves primarily as an information and referral service for families. Calls to the helpline during the pandemic were getting intense, Ciardi recalled.

“Families were struggling at home because of the lack of supports. They were seeing their kids regress and behaviors evolve into explosive meltdowns and there weren’t the resources to get what they need,” she said. “You felt helpless. We’re in a position to want to help and provide opportunities for families. If you can’t do this in person, what good is it?”

Autism Up, which is under the GAC roof, got creative with some of its recreation and social skills and fitness classes by going virtual. It allowed participants to see familiar faces and help individuals keep some semblance of a routine, an important aspect of life for those with autism.

“As far as operationally, we were already planning before we got the word that everybody needed to go home to switch things up around the building. We have a lot of shared spaces in the building, a lot of shared equipment. We put in a really extensive cleaning process. It’s a challenge when you have 12 different agencies under one roof and some have accountability to state organizations,” Ciardi said. “We pitch ourselves as a collaborative community of providers, and that’s what we did trying to make sure everybody was on the same page and keeping all the people that call the GAC their home away from home safe upon return.”

GAC was supported by the United Way and RACF through a grant that helped the nonprofit through the first stage of the pandemic. Ciardi said her biggest struggle has been fundraising.

“Coming into this position I had to launch a second phase of our capital campaign, which we still needed to raise $1 million,” she said. “Launching a capital campaign amidst a pandemic was a struggle. We haven’t been successful; we’ve raised close to $200,000 of it.”

And Ciardi and her staff are dealing with another challenge.

“We are finding that a lot of our families are not only struggling with autism but there are also those families who are struggling with food insecurity, who are in a domestic violence situation or homelessness,” she said. “We actually had to help a couple of families who found themselves in homeless shelters, which was a real struggle. All of that really opened up our eyes to all of the other issues that families are struggling with on top of autism.”

But those realizations have helped GAC discover gaps and where other needs are for families.

“It’s unfortunate that that was the way it was brought to light, but now we know how else we can support them,” Ciardi said.

The United Way has spent the last 10 months working to support the numerous organizations impacted by the pandemic. The organization’s chief impact officer, Jen Cathy, said no one organization or entity could have done what the community has accomplished without one another’s support and creativity.

“We’ve pivoted in critically important ways. That first week in March when we had our initial case of COVID in the community, we knew immediately that we had to go into crisis mode,” Cathy said. “One of the things I’m proud about the United Way is that crisis mode is a sweet spot for us, that we can mobilize quickly, we have people who truly are creative and resilient and will roll up their sleeves regardless of the time it takes or the amount of energy it takes, and that’s really what we saw.”

The United Way provides funding for 53 organizations, and many were struggling to keep their doors open and serve clients. Nor did they know where to go for information and help.

“One of the things we did within that first week was develop a human services support hub. We launched a platform for all human services organizations across the county and then supported the launch of a similar platform in the rural areas where nonprofits were able to go for support, where they could post their questions, they could get information, where they could answer each other’s questions,” Cathy explained. “What we saw was a community being developed on that portal. People posted well wishes to one another, they posted messages around keeping one another strong through the crisis, but then they also offered their supports.”

And there was tremendous collaboration.

“We always have nurtured this spirit of volunteerism in our community — that has been a longstanding tenet of the United Way. One of the gifts (of the pandemic) is that it really motivated us to launch the Volunteer United portal,” Cathy said. “And that portal was critical because we had to figure out a way as a community to get food out the door quickly and safety because there was a food crisis.”

United Way partnered with Foodlink Inc., Lifespan of Greater Rochester Inc., Action for a Better Community and others to promote a need on the portal and get hundreds of volunteers from the community to support efforts for safe and effective food distribution.

“It was beautiful,” Cathy said. “Lifespan completely shifted their model of delivery so they were able to help over the past nine months and people are receiving 40-pound boxes of food. There have been over 20,000 drive-through registrations.”

Rochester’s Regional Transit Service has helped deliver PPE and food during the pandemic as well, and 211 Lifeline helped coordinate food delivery efforts.

The Community Crisis Fund, which now is closed, raised $6.8 million, of which $6.4 million has been distributed. The remaining money will be used to support innovative, collaborative efforts, Cathy said. In addition to United Way and RACF, the Farash Foundation, ESL Federal Credit Union and Greater Rochester Health Foundation collaborated on the fund, sitting on the governance committee as voting members.

Other collaborations include the city of Rochester partnering with 20 local restaurants to deliver hot meals to seniors 60 and older in the city. 211 Lifeline also is managing those deliveries. Nearly 14,000 meals have been delivered through that program.

When the Rochester City School District was forced to close its doors, several agencies opened theirs to help kids learn virtually and offer afterschool programs. Boys and Girls Clubs of Rochester were worried about the families it serves because they were not seeing them in the beginning of the pandemic. In addition to extending their hours, the organization also began delivering food door-to-door to families that would typically use its services.

Cathy said what she has learned through all of this is that nonprofits must have their indirect costs covered. Technology plays a crucial role in the success of the not-for-profit sector now and into the future.

“We know this now more than ever, but I think what was so eye-opening to me is how our smaller not-for-profits, they were using pen and paper at times. Not because they didn’t have the skills or abilities, but because they didn’t have the funding resources to support what they needed,” she said. “And that has to change. We can’t behave that way any longer as a community and as funders. And the only way we’re going to make a difference is to realize how important that is.”

And she also learned how important collaboration is, particularly the private-public partnership.

“How we pivoted is incredible in that we’ve learned to work differently together, we’ve formed critical relationships around the public-private sector, bringing us together to make decisions on funding,” Cathy said. “We learned a lot about each other, but we’ve learned a lot about how we could fund in a different way to better support our nonprofit sector.”

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