Learning from one program to re-open another during the pandemic.

Re-opening our Clubs last spring, after we were required to shut down due to the pandemic, was something programs across the country looked forward to. We were thrilled to re-open our Clubs for children and youth on June 15. We had been closed for nearly three months and teams could not wait to get back to work to kick off summer camps! Our five Club locations were some of the first to re-open throughout all of Canada and there are a few major reasons that we were able to move so quickly.

One of the biggest factors was that at Trellis, we have housing programs that run 24/7 and are considered an essential service, so they never closed! The teams who run these 24/7 programs were forced to learn how to navigate all of the COVID-19 operational directives that the government mandated back in March of 2020. Protocols and procedures were created internally right away, which allowed the agency to iron out a lot of the kinks and share any learnings across teams by the time Clubs were ready to re-open in June.

A second reason that Clubs staff were ready to re-open so quickly was that some of the team had actually been working in our 24/7 housing programs for months. Many Clubs staff were re-deployed in March to support with staffing demands across our seven group homes or within Camp COVID. Camp COVID was a Trellis site that we set up to house and support any youth who tested positive for COVID-19 throughout the pandemic. All of these different experiences allowed Clubs staff to gain knowledge and training with the new directives long before welcoming kids back to Clubs.

After all of the hard work and commitment from our Clubs team, we were able to offer 11 weeks of in-person summer camps. Although registration numbers started out slow with families having some hesitation towards in-person activities, we ended the summer with many camps completely full and attendance that compared to pre-pandemic summers. Camps ended up being a huge success for the Clubs team which allowed us to prepare for kids to return to more typical programing in the fall.

None of this success came without struggle; there were challenges like adhering to the new sanitizing protocols within staff’s allotted working hours and managing staff coverage when team members were symptomatic or experienced a close contact. The team really had to stretch at times and adapt to the everchanging situation. However, through this whole experience, we were shown the value of the Trellis continuum of programs and services once again. The cross-program collaboration and knowledge sharing allowed for the acceleration of opening Clubs programming back up to kids and families who rely on it.