Dealing with Disaster

Can you talk about the ways the pandemic has affected your operations and what strategies that you use to inspire your team to be creative and to be innovative about coming up with new ways to operate amid a really an unprecedented crisis in this country?

So that is a wonderful question. And I have to tell you, the Red Cross is sort of constructed to deal with disasters. That is what we do for a living. So, this was one that was quite bigger than anything any of us had ever experienced. And this disaster year has been the worst in recent history. We had 30 named storms, 12 of them hit landfall. We had tornadoes, constant wildfires, mass shootings with civil unrest. It was a really tough year. But what I am most proud of is just the way everyone adapted. They had no choice. So instead of opening up those large congregate shelters that were known for, we put people in hotels and if we had to use the shelter, we would separate all the families by more than social distance. Everyone had to wear masks. Everybody had to have a health screening.
We didn't have a single COVID outbreak as a result. Our blood services organization, you know, we were staring at another health crisis because we had a blood shortage. Nobody wanted to go outside. Everybody was afraid of the pandemic and we had to stand up blood drives in big giant places, hotel ballrooms, stadiums to be able to collect blood. And we did that very quickly and efficiently. And we learned a lot about what we can do even after the pandemic.

So you adapted.

That's exactly right. And the other thing that we do after each disaster, we do an after action and we go, what did we do right? What did we do wrong? How are we going to correct? And we did that midway through COVID. We said, okay, what have we learned? And we learned a lot. I mean, we learned that we can have meetings like this one and save donor dollars by not flying around for internal meetings. We learned that we could be much faster and more efficient and run bigger blood dries and fewer drives, which would help our productivity improve.