Recyclist Podcast: The Covid Era w/ Brenda Haney

Like what were like the first couple days of trying to transition to like, oh, this is really happening.

There was a little bit of a wait and see initially, right? Because we didn't really know where this was going.

And I had actually just gotten back from a board meeting less than three weeks before the pandemic was announced.

And so there was a kind of this, what are we doing with this? What is this really gonna look like? And if you'll recall, everybody was trying to, they were like, is this real? Is this coming to the United States? How is this going to impact us? What does this mean? And that happened with the association also.

So we were trying to figure out like, are we gonna, Continue going into the office.

You know, are we going to continue to try to host it? Because we didn't really know.

We didn't know how widespread and intense this was going to be.

And then it was very, very obvious, very quickly, we've got to pivot.

We've got to make some different choices and we got to get on those right away.

So we were under contract with facilities.

I mean, we plan those events far in advance, right? So we've got two or three years already keyed up and we're looking at going even further.

I didn't realize it was that far out.

We try to

get at least three years out in advance on contracts so that we can get the space that we want and the location that we want.

And we can really start planning that.

We want to make it a great event, right? So here we are within a few months of when that event is supposed to happen, and it's like, okay, we've got to start talking with our legal counsel.

We've got to start talking with the venue so that we can figure out what this means to us.

And we may have had force majeure clauses in our contracts, but they're dealing with those natural disasters, you know, acts of war, tornadoes, hurricanes, those kind of events.

Something like

this was kind of unprecedented, yeah.

There wasn't a clause for a COVID-19 pandemic, right? There's no global pandemic clause that was built into those contracts at that time.

So we really had to, everybody was pivoting in real time.

So it was very fluid and it was very dynamic and it took a lot of people jumping, you know, changing all of their attention really very quickly.

What did that pivot ultimately look like?

Yeah, so the first thing we had to do is how do we cancel a national conference and what does that impact mean? I mean, we're a big organization by members.