The last 12months have been a whirlwind of activity! Did you learn how to do things a little bit differently in 2020 than you have been used to doing them previous years? If you're like the rest of us you surely did.
During 2020 I wrote a great deal about the global pandemic and all of the issues that we had dealing with this new thing called COVID. Small business reinvented itself with new ways of serving their customers and many took my "Do You Innovate" article to heart and took their businesses to the next level. Local restaurants learned how to do curbside pickup and takeout as a way to serve their customers. Retailers learned about e-marketing and how to let their customers shop online via their websites.
Service businesses and nonprofits adopted a new meeting platform called Zoom and, for the most part, we embraced the platform with gusto. I, unwittingly, used Zoom so often that I was able to compare it to its competitors. Yes, Zoom has competitors. Did you use Zoom or did you use one of the alternatives? Cisco Webex, GoToMeeting, Google Hangouts, Skype and Microsoft Teams are just a few of the most popular platforms out there right now. Although they are all good, in and of themselves, I must say that Microsoft Teams is the one that gave me the most trouble. I'm not a techie, or IT guru, so I just want something that is simple and easy to use. Something that I can click a button, or two, to get right into a meeting. By the way, ZOOM, is my favorite video meeting platform to use.
We experienced every one of our National Holidays during a public health order and we saw our sporting events in a totally different way this year. Remember when you would hold up a sign with a picture of your favorite player and everyone would know who you were rooting for? Now you can send in a big picture of yourself and the network will put it in the stands, and the players can watch a likeness of you there in the stands, virtually. I watched a video of JJ Watt, from the Houston Texans, commenting about how strange it was to play in a stadium with no fans present. I immediately knew that playing in the marching band at my alma mater must have been, in some strange way, preparing us for COVID because we played to empty stadiums often.
Last year was also a different year for those of us in chamber work. The mission of the Silver City Grant County Chamber of Commerce is to serve our members by promoting business, commerce and tourism in Grant County, and 2020 made it tough to adhere to part of our mission. We took countless calls from people who wanted to come to Silver City for a visit or a meeting and all we could do was inform them about the public health order. It was hard to tell somebody from a neighboring state, whose ordinances were seemingly different from ours, that they would need to quarantine for two weeks upon their arrival. Most didn't really understand that and some made sure that we knew just how unhappy this rule made them.
In 2020 we did a great deal of "behind the scenes" work on behalf of our community. We are serving on the Emerging Infectious Diseases Task Force where we talk about COVID and the county-wide response to the virus. On the Grant County Health Council, we are talking about a multi-pronged approach to make sure that the hardest to serve segments of our community are given the resources they need to thrive. The Next Steps task force is an ongoing effort to bring business leaders together in a forum which they have been so far unfamiliar. That taskforce gathered more than 60 business owners and civic leaders to discuss the needs of the community and actions that needed to be taken to safely, successfully, reopen our town for business. The discussions have been lively and open.
There are so many partnerships and cooperatives that have been generated as a result of COVID and this pandemic. Although you may not be privy to every single conversation, I can assure you that there are many people hard at work on your behalf.
Two to three years from now, the discussions that have been going on in our community will be the difference makers when it came to how we emerged from this pandemic. We will not have emerged unscathed, but we will emerge none-the-less. The information we have gathered in 2020-21 will be valuable to Grant County in 2026 if we use it for productive means. I may not be here at this post in 2026, but I guarantee I will do everything possible to see that the businesses you trust today are still here in five years.