While it’s important to remember that we’ve kept our lobbies closed to general foot traffic during the pandemic to keep staff and members safe, safety has not been the only reason. By keeping staff and members separate we reduce the chance that infection poses to service. If we have too many of our team out ill at once we may be forced to scale back our services and/or hours to the number of staff able to work. If the numbers grow too high we may be forced to close a branch, or branches, temporarily until enough of the team recovers; falling back on electronic services only. While we have plans in place to cope with even the most dire scenarios, we’d prefer to avoid them if possible. For the foreseeable future, we plan to continue with the smaller inconvenience of lobby closures to help avoid more severe disruptions that may occur if we don’t.
Additionally, we’re trying to do our part to support our local hard-working healthcare heroes. By keeping lobbies closed and limiting the possibilities for COVID to spread we’re helping keep nurses, doctors, first responders, and other health care workers from being overrun and overwhelmed. They’re going above and beyond the call of duty to care for the ill and the dying, while battling illness among their own ranks that stretch them all even further in this season of greatest need.
We believe in working together, and now more than Americans have in a long time, we must each individually be willing to shoulder some inconvenience in service to a greater goal. Many of us were raised to believe that we should love our neighbor as ourselves, and we can all come together to show that we still hold that in our hearts. That’s why credit unions were created in the first place, to help one another through hard times.
Even now, when we can start to see light at the end of this dark tunnel in the form of vaccines it’s important that we pull together and each do what we can to insure that as many of us as possible make it through to the other side. Let’s take care of one another, love our neighbors, and get through this together.