How COVID-19 has Affected Our Work
The
people we house are among the most vulnerable to the virus: immunosuppressed
due to HIV, and many are living with co-occurring illnesses like diabetes,
heart disease, and other issues.
COVID-related staffing, service and supply changes/disruptions have made
our day-to-day work at Clare Housing that much more vital, but more
multi-layered than ever before. With increased staffing and transportation
costs, the need for additional protective equipment and household supplies,
and increased monitoring for all our residents, we have needed to be a
responsive, nimble and innovative agency.
We have accrued additional and unbudgeted costs over the past six months.
Clare Housing has needed to increase the number of nursing hours for our
Director of Nursing and our direct-line nurses to provide education to
residents and staff regarding the risks of contracting and spreading COVID-19
to others, and how to adhere to safety precautions.
Additionally, in tandem with COVID-19 affecting our agency, the next wave
that hit our agency was the killing of George Floyd. Just days after the
George Floyd incident here in Minneapolis, we needed to completely evacuate
our Clare Midtown building for a period of 3 days. Midtown, located just
blocks from the Lake St./Hiawatha area where the majority of the racial
tensions and uprisings were happening, lost all electricity and power to the
building. Being just one block from the burned out 3rd Precinct Minneapolis
Police Station, and amongst on-going fires, protests and unrest, we were
forced to close the building and relocate all 45 of our Midtown residents and
all staff members. Due to COVID-19 precautions and CDC standards, we could
not relocate our residents to our other properties and needed to re-home every
resident short-term to a hotel in a suburban area in the Twin Cities.
With all these changes and additional costs, in addition of shift coverage
and higher staffing costs, Clare Housing has absorbed these unexpected and
unbudgeted costs and continued to provide our life changing and life-saving
work.
Specific to how Clare Housing responded with alternative program and agency
delivery methods during COVID-19, as an agency we continued our vital work
without any gaps or pauses. With that, our staffing structure has changed to
meet the on-going needs of our residents to stay safely housed and healthy in
two major ways. First, all non-essential Clare staff members have been
working remotely from their homes, doing their work 100% virtually. Secondly,
the day-to-day work of direct service and support for our 254 residents
continues at our 7 housing units 24/7. The work of front-line employees now
involves wearing masks and gloves, PPE (personal protective equipment),
assessing all residents' temperatures, intensive use of cleaning and
sanitizing products for all common areas, working behind acrylic, protective
screens, in addition to all the "normal" work of monitoring our
residents' health, distribution of medications, setting up transportation to
medical appointments, etc.
Additionally, because of these protective policies and standards, agency
visitors/volunteers/potential donors are not allowed to be onsite which has
affected our capacity to build our volunteer and our donor databases, and
raise additional funds.