Dear Docents and Volunteers,
Well we are in week 4 of Chicago’s COVID 19 Stay at Home: Save a Life Campaign. The good news is that I still get along with my husband. I am so glad that he took docent training as he can keep me entertained for hours with trivia and factoids
I have some good news that we were informed yesterday that we were successfully in getting the Payroll Protection Program loan under the CARES Act. This program lends us the money for salaries and overhead such as rent and utilities and then forgives it if we keep our salaries and headcount stable. The loan is for $950K and forgiveness is hopefully for the same amount and will happen in December.
I hope by now you have seen our new weekly magazine titled CAC@Home which comes out every Thursday. We have multiple sections: CAC LIVE, CAC RECOMMENDS, FOR THE FAMILY, ONE MORE THING and THE LATEST. The magazine brings great news for all lovers of architecture, design, urbanism and Chicago history and features architecture experts, design practitioners, acclaimed authors, industry leaders and engages the organization’s corps of more than 600 docents and volunteers. I want to thank the many docents who have stepped up to deliver both LIVE and online content. The effort to get this out has been an amazing collaboration across departments and with the docents and volunteers. It has been impressive how nimble and quick the whole team has been in developing a new content deliver system for the CAC.
I am fortunate that I am on the board of Choose Chicago and in a leadership position as Vice Chair as this is allowing me to sit at the table for a lot of meetings about the crisis and restarting the city. One of the taskforces I am on is called Chicago Pledge which is made up of people from all aspects of the tourism community – hotels, restaurants, airlines, sports teams, attractions and museums. We are working on “reopening the city” after COVID-19.
The first phase is to welcome residents to come back and enjoy their city again. The tourism message is: It’s Safe Again – Welcome Back. This will focus on Friends and Family enjoying the city and will promote “Staycations” promoting our hotels, restaurants and museums/ attractions. The next will be a regional campaign for the drive market. This however will be dependent on the safety of our surrounding states, since all are aware of the risk of reinfection with some areas of the country having more stringent measures than others. A national campaign will be rolled out when it is deemed the country is “safe” which we hope will be the fourth quarter. It is not expected that we will see many international visitors in 2020 but this is dependent on both travel distribution channels – where are flights coming in from and travel restrictions imposed by countries.
CAC is beginning to develop our “welcome back” strategy for residents and visitors. We need to say we are open for business but make sure that we are sensitive to security, health and safety and to the hardship that many are or have endured. We expect that some form of social distancing will still be in place and will use that in our scenario planning of our roll out. We want to encourage the Civic Pride of Chicagoans to support their city. The CAC will be open again for business and we want to be ready for that day – whenever it is!
Happy Passover and Easter to you and your family as we learn to celebrate in new ways.
Warm regards,
Lynn