Hi, everyone. It's Juliana again with LeadingAge, and I'm here with Brandon to talk about staffing considerations. Welcome, Brandon. Hi, Juliana. Yes, I am Brandon Moss. I'm the Regional Manager at CSI support and development, and I run the Maryland region. Fantastic. Brandon, you're based in Maryland. Can you tell us a little bit more about your role, what parts of the country you work with? Yes. As Regional Manager, I work with one particular region, CSI has four. We developed a managed affordable senior housing, and we do that in California, Michigan, Massachusetts, and here in Maryland. I'm in charge of the Maryland office. We do everything we need to do to operate our site here. We have 11 sites in Maryland. I've oversee a team that takes care financial certification for applicants and residents. We have a development we do here, we have operations, educations, everything. Facilities, everything that happens in Maryland. I am here to help support. That sounds like a never ending task, Brandon. Fantastic. Have a great. It's affordable senior housing. What can you tell me about the residents who live in your communities, especially average age or income, things like that? Well, we are all affordable. We have various programs that we do affordable housing under. We have HUD programs, we have the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program, but pretty much everyone is 62 or older and have to meet certain income limits, have to be under a certain income limits in order to qualify to live here. Great. Let's talk staffing. I know that because of CSI's unique co-operative model, you have actually fewer staff present on-site in general. But how did the pandemic impact that? Yes. Our cooperative management system means that the members, we call them members, the residents that live in our buildings, we call them co-ops. The members that live in our co-ops help manage the day-to-day operation and they partner with staff and in all aspects. If you have an apartment building, you have to do leasing, maintenance, finance. We have a leasing committee, maintenance committee, finance committee. There's a council of elected members who make the big decisions, whether co-op and we have to have the help provide support for them. What that means is, on site every day there is any number of volunteer seniors and offices and going around the common areas and working with vendors and what have you. It creates a real community. For a lot of years, we've been developing this great community. You come in, we used to get hugs before the pandemic. There was quite a team that built there. This is how we've been doing business. Then the pandemic comes and you say, "Well, how do we then keep everybody safe?" Because that's our top priority and continue this community, and that was the challenge. But in the beginning of the pandemic, our solution was to simply ask everyone just to self quarantine, To go home, be safe. Our population is more vulnerable to the Coronavirus, so we ask everybody go home, be safe. We [inaudible] the same thing as much as possible, and it was just a matter of just getting to that place. After that, the conversation as the Coronavirus has continued, the conversation has been, how do we keep the co-operativism going? How do we keep operations going while keeping everyone safe? We brought people back, but in very limited scenario, lots of protocols, following CDC guidelines, masks, instead of having three or four people in an office, there's one. Anything we can do to keep everybody safe, but also ensure that we're engaging the members in running their home. How to basically continue the core of your mission, of your model in this pandemic informed way, that's no easy task. You mentioned a lot of your volunteer activities, but what are the actual staff who are onsite? Onsite, we have a number of staff. Right now, we have our service coordinators and the service coordinators are resident advocates. They're there to help the seniors take care of themselves and their apartment whatever they may need and in those areas. They are onsite 40 hours a week. Then we have our maintenance personnel who obviously are taking care of the maintenance of the building in partnership with the members. We have our custodial staff as well as we have the emergency response persons. We have a staff person that will live on-site, and help take care of nighttime emergencies and do some custodial duties. That's our existing staff on-site. Most of that stayed the same during the pandemic. The service coordinators initially went home and worked remotely. The on-site custodial, maintenance, ERP staff, we call them ERPs, the Emergency Response Persons, they actually rent their apartments and stay in there and continue their duties. What everyone did, there was really transition to a lot of sanitizing. It was just everything was being sanitized, high- touch areas, common areas, anything you can get to. All three of those positions we're continuing to do the sanitation to help make sure we kept everybody safe. Essentially, reassigning or refocusing both staff and volunteer activities? Yes, absolutely. Now that the pandemic, again we're later in the pandemic now, and so the personnel are back to their normal duties more. Custodians still are doing lot of sanitizing, but maintenance has begun to step back up again and so the maintenance folks are back to maintenance and the service coordinators, we're actually back on site. We found that they have to do a lot of relationship-building and it's not easy to do that when you're actually with people. But again, they're on site with all kinds of protocols, and protections, and PPE and all that good stuff to make sure that everyone stay safe. Absolutely. Speaking of building relationships and leveraging tools to do that, I think technology has become a lot more important for all of us, but what is the role of technology being, especially for your staff, throughout the pandemic? Technology's been huge. We've actually been able to do a lot of remote work. So obviously you have to make sure everyone has the technology to do that. Zoom and Teams has been our best friend. We see each other really through video calls a lot, particularly on the staff side. But also we're able to provide appropriate technology to our volunteers as well so that they can continue to meet as a council, communicate with the management staff that are off site, and just continue the day-to-day operations of the co-op as best you can during the pandemic. What kinds of technology solutions have you all implemented? So you mentioned your service coordinators, for example, working remotely and other staff as well. So what technological solutions do you all use for that? Well, regionally, most of our staff that were on the management team or even our service coordinators, a lot of them actually already had laptops that were assigned. So that was actually a pretty easy transition for most of them. Then for our volunteers, we were able to provide some low cost technologies, some iPads, so that they could continue to do work from their apartment. Great. So overcoming technological literacy and capacity issues has been going smoothly for you all? Yes. Actually, I think for the staff, the transition was the use of technology. Again, there were already using a lot of it. I think the seniors had been really interesting. They've been able to. A lot of them have been using Zoom and things that they're with their family so or they have cell phones. So it's been interesting to see some of them transition and use a little more technology. But again, we always still have phones which everyone's already comfortable with, but is great to see everybody use that technology. Yeah, I think it's been a learning curve for everyone. All right. Last question for you. Talk to us about employee morale, and I guess for you, this relates to staff as well as your volunteers. How is morale going? Any long-term impacts that you see on the culture? Yes. So morale is the [inaudible]. As far as I can tell, I think morale is actually still pretty up. I think a lot of the positive place overall, I think our organization took this pandemic very seriously and had been able to provide a lot of flexibility, a lot of support. So everyone's had the opportunity to stay engaged and do their jobs as much as possible. I think we've been very flexible with folks both on really the volunteer side but also on the staff side. The long-term dynamic for me, I think is anytime you have everyone going through the same experience, a shared experience tends to bring people together. So I would like to think, and I'd hope, that long term we'll see significant strengthening over time of morale and a sense of team because we've always going to agree that the pandemic was really crazy. That one-year, hopefully. [inaudible] I also think that, do the technology and the communication, inter regionally across states. We're spread out across the country. Really increased communication, I think that helps with morale as well. More people are engaged in the conversation and discussions at a national level. Certainly the same thing here regionally. I think being able to increase that communication through technology, something that we're going to take with us for a long time. It's so good to hear that this culture of we're all in this together being strengthened with you guys. So fantastic work keeping, staff, and residents safe throughout all this. So thanks for being with us, Brandon. Thanks Juliana.
