Partnerships across Champaign-Urbana were critical to the SHIELD team’s success. The team partnered with Champaign-Urbana Public Health District, the mayors of Champaign and Urbana, local businesses, and collaborators campus-wide. Community leadership, including the mayors of Champaign and Urbana, facilitated partnerships with local businesses and community groups to foster prospective actions to be prepared to address any challenges that arose.
The pandemic also presented a major communications challenge: how do we all communicate when we cannot be together? This is where Martin Burke, Carle Illinois associate dean for research, says virtual meetings through software like Zoom, were a silver lining. Not only did virtual meetings foster collaboration and success- but they also allowed for many more people to come together and collaborate than would have been able to in an in-person setting.
“It was a very useful way to bring people together quickly who would otherwise be able to get into the same room, “Burke said. “We’ve gotten a lot better a video conferencing and it sounds simple, but it’s been extremely powerful to see how quickly we can get all the right stake-holders into the “same room” virtually and have really engaging meaningful discussions.”
Somedays, video conferencing went on from 7:30 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. nearly non-stop. This was one of the ways that got everyone together quickly. “We all knew we were in a crisis and rather than cower under that stress or strain and climb into our caves and hope for the best- we all teamed up and said ‘We’re going to push back. We are going to go on offense and find a way to leverage innovation and collaboration to make a difference,” Burke said.
This is Part 4 of the series “A Look Back on Carle Illinois' Response to COVID-19.”