Hi. I'm Juliana Bilowich, with LeadingAge, and I'm here with Yuri Escandon, with TELACU Residential Management and Property Management. Yuri, thanks so much for being with us today. Let's start with where you work and what your role is, I'd also love to hear about how many residents you serve and with how many staff? Yes, Juliana its great to be here with you. I'm the Vice President for Field Operations for TELACU Residential and Property Management. TELACU is the East LA Community Union. We're here in California located about 2 miles from LA East Los Angeles. In my capacity as Vice President of Field Operations, I have the pleasure of serving over 4,000 residents, and close to 60 different communities, and I'm supported in that service by almost 220 amazing employees that work alongside with me. Wow. Amazing. Yuri, how long have you been there? I've been here at TELACU now for close to 13 years. I've grown up along TELACU. TELACU has over 13 different industries under it's umbrella, and some of those have to do with college education, high school advancement, veterans programs, so, I've been here at 13 on the TELACU Property Management, but as a whole TELACU has been a part of my life, I think since I was a young 10-year-old. So just a few years ago. Yes. Just a few years ago. All right. Well, let's talk about pandemic preparedness. I don't think anybody saw this pandemic coming, so, tell us how did you all respond in terms of emergency planning and preparedness actions? You know Juliana, that's a really good question, especially now hindsight, we're able to look back, and I remember the date of March 26th, which happened to be my birthday, we received a call from one of our managers that she had in fact come in contact with someone in her community of 40 units that was tested positive for COVID-19, and so, that in many ways just kind of brought it home for us that, goodness gracious we are here now. What are we going to do? We mobilized with the guidance and leadership of our CEO, Dr. Michael Lizarraga, our President, Jasmine Borrego. A task force was mobilized that same day, and myself, Karina Barragan, who you'll hear from later, and six other individuals were selected from the various different departments in our company to put together this task force and start generating some ideas on how to tackle this pandemic. We have emergency plans in place for fires, earthquakes, but how do you deal with the virus? The first thing we did is, we put our heads together as we realized that the CDC had guidance out there. We spent quite a bit of time going through the different recommendations that they were making, then of course, the State of California, the governor's office was also putting out some additional guidance, and what we did, is we generated from these various organizations, their different ideas, we put together a limited access policy for TELACU Residential and Property Management. That limited access policy was very strong in limiting access to those that did not need to be in our community. The close to 4,000 residents that we care for are elderly, older adults, and as you know they were the group that was at a high risk, particularly with the situations that happened back East, there was a lot of information coming out that, our elderly would succumb, would die if they came in contact with this virus. So we put this limited access policy in place, we made it effective April 1st. No pun intended. April Fool's Day, we didn't want to go out and humor everybody with this, but we had to shift immediately how we did our operations. Remember that our seniors lean heavily on social interaction, people coming to visit them, provide them with the systems, and we had to shift completely away from that. That was our first step in this emergency, planning was setting up our limited access policy. Wow. Incredible. I know that you all have done so much to take keep everyone as safe as possible. What about ongoing emergency preparedness in response to the pandemic specifically? You notice viruses obviously, I would say evolving wave in the sense that new information comes out almost daily, the data, the science of it, if you would, but there's emergencies that are presenting themselves that I think even Karina, when you hear from her later can speak to, but on a daily operational basis, we're dealing with a typical emergencies we had in the past, for example, a resident falling in their unit. We have the daily structural emergencies of water leak, we have emergencies with residents being locked out, we've had elevators go down, so when you're asking a question about the daily emergencies or how we're tackling the day-to-day operations, what we've had to make such significant shift and every one of our policies, what we've done is responding to a pool court emergency, a resident being down. We have modified that to make sure that our physical distancing, guidelines are in place to make sure that we're still providing our service, we're still getting emergency services to that person. We're independent living facilities in the sense that we're not monitoring 24/7 the care of each one of the resident. We've had to make adjustments in regards to that. Water leak, just had one last week, a resident left her sink on, they stepped away and went to go watch the TV resulted in a significant flood for the first, second or third, second and first floors. We had to relocate the residents, we had to bring vendors then to do that work. In years past, you didn't have to think about the pandemic, you didn't have to think about the virus. But now we have to make sure that the vendors are adhering to all the physical distancing guidelines, we have to make sure that we are relocating the residents to a safe place because they can't be here while the work is getting done. You can imagine if you don't have good procedural guidelines in place already, You're already behind the eight ball and you're having to recreate all this and keep everybody safe and keep your elderly, your older adults away from any type of contact or exposure to the virus. That's required a lot of thinking outside the box by our teams in the field. I'm talking to you from one of our communities here. This is Telacu Del Rio in supporting the 80 plus residents we have here are a resident Manager, a building technician or building maintenance. We also have a resident services coordinator. That team, that tripod has had to think outside the box quite often when these emergencies pop up. When the different situations come up. I'm seeing our employees do things that I never expected them to do in the sense that they're really thinking outside the box, coming up with great ideas. That's amazing. I love your description of the tripod and how do you in your role support them in adapting and responding to emergencies both that long ongoing Covid-19 emergency, but also the daily emergencies that you're describing in the pandemic contexts? I think in simplest terms you have to listen. You can't support your staff in the field if you don't listen. They're here, they're the operators in the trenches. As a Marine, one of the old saying that we had if combat really comes down to the Marine to your left and to your right. You really can't see the entire battle in essence, you just have to focus to your left, to your right and what's in front of you. A good commander in the field will listen to his Marines in the trenches. They're seeing what's to the left, to the right and then they put the bigger picture of the plan together. One thing that we do is we check in with our field teams on a daily basis. Our supervisors are contacting them. They're having meetings like this virtually because we want to limit our contact even amongst one another and then we listen to them. I'll give you an example of listening. Last week during one of our manager meeting, the conversation came up about Halloween. As you know our residents, many of them don't have supportive families. We've seen that even more now than in years past because they're alone, they don't have anyone that's really checking in on them. A lot of the families have been, I hate to use the word but abandon them. Even in this crisis, you would think they would come out of the woodwork, but it's been the opposite. There had been staying away. Halloween came up because there was a way to maybe get our residents involved, maybe to have small little candy bag, we can't get them together in the community room. But what can we do to interact with them? When you listen, you come up with some ideas and you often come up with a lot of concerns. Well, we can't give a lot of our residents candy because there may be some diabetics. We can give some of them anything with peanuts, what if they have a peanut allergy? I'm saying all this to you because that's the direction a conversation goes, we start thinking, how are we going to do this? Where's the money going to come from? Can we take this out of this part of money? How do we engage the residents? Can we do a zoom call? Can we do a Skype call? When you listen to your troops in the field, they have some good ideas. One of the ideas that came up is like, maybe we'll do it like we do in our food distribution. Because there's a real need, residents don't have food. They're not going out and for a while they remember there's pandemic shut everything down. Our seniors needed to find ways to actually feed themselves. We set up different systems that are communities for people who receive the meal from the food bank, and all those things. To go back to that, you have to listen. It can look good on my computer screen, on my plan of action, my plan of operation on a table, but really if I'm not listening to the troops in the field, I will fail and my seniors will perish. That's really what it comes out to see, you have to be a good listener in cases of emergencies of its nature. Yeah. Absolutely. What did you all decide to do for Halloween, have you decided yet? Well, some communities are going to do virtual Halloween dressed up. I guess parade where we're going to have our seniors send in their pictures and we're going to put them into some casual collage so that we have a dress up contest. Some of the other communities are wanting to leverage the technology a little more and do something live. It's still in the works and we're excited about whatever we do here for this week for that, which is the low Halloween thing, we want to feel we can build that into thanksgiving and our holiday events, Christmas and whatnot. Because these are very important to a resonant. Quite often as I've mentioned to you before, they don't have anyone. They have each other, but now the contexts limited for them. They can't enjoy the community room, they can't be here with each other. Yeah. I know that social interaction is so important, that's mental health and mental well-being, peace in addition to the physical well being. Absolutely. Speaking of well-being, I know that you all are going through some wildfires right now. How's the going over there? Well, California right? We get earthquakes, we get wildfires, we get to about everything out here. Last night actually, I received the call from one of our communities out in the City of Irvine. There's three group homes there that we provide management services to, and the manager was very proactive in getting ahead of the evacuation order and she was able to move the residents, older disabled adult into one of the other homes. Overnight we were very concerned that the evacuation order would come the direction of that group home, and that would mean that we would have to house those residents somewhere. In the meantime, until they're part of the actual evacuation order, we really can't move them because in the profession of affordable housing, you have to be sensitive to the cost. You would think that we wouldn't, but we have to be because at some point, this cost is going to have to be borne by that entity, that community, that association. The fortunate thing is that the evacuation line did not move the direction of the home, and earlier this morning they were able to return to their group homes. The air quality is horrible, there's ashes, smoke all over the place, but you know, this is a reminder that in this profession, literally it's 24/7. I know this, our staff knows this, our President, our CEO is aware of this, there's no let-up. There's always something going on. I think that's where we were well prepared to deal with this virus directly because we had good procedures in place, indirectly because it regardless to the emergency, we're always ready to adapt and overcome whatever the challenges. If there's anything I can tell you about our team and our managers is that they've been able to adapt and overcome, and that's been very fortunate for us. Just incredible. I know that everybody there is so lucky to have your on the roles that you're in. Thanks for that 24/7. Let's look long-term a little, so what kind of emergency preparedness Are you planning? Are you anticipating a new normal related to the pandemic and what kinds of tools are you leveraging for that preparedness? Well, I think the question regards to preparing long-term, really it's daily. I think anyone that is worth this salt and this profession have a good plan of emergency in place. Good plan of action. I think someone that is a good forward thinker, is always thinking ahead to this pandemic or wandering what the changes are. I don't see us going back to the way we did business before, and I'll give you a simple example. Every one of these communities has to go through an annual recertification process for their revenue. Is that an emergency? No, but this pandemic now has limited the contact I have with that resident to complete that annual recertification process. In essence, I have an emergency in hand because if I don't complete this annual recertification process, there is no structurely that I can receive from HUD in order to keep operations and rent and all those things going. So we've had to virtualize that process, whether it's providing a lot of the information through mail, whether it's providing some of that information that have to be completed by calling the resident and placing it at their door, so they may get it and then they complete it. We've had to virtualize some of the meeting opportunities that we now have, we can do with Zoom. If we physically need to meet with a resident we have to do it in the large community room. We've set up our plexiglass shield, and we've also been able to then conduct a meeting with physical distancing guidelines in place. We had to leverage the technology heavily. We have One Call Now, which is a system that allows us to send messages to the residents in multiple languages. Even if it's a reminder about people, what needs to be submitted, or rent's coming up, please make sure you push the rent in the rent-drop box. We've had to leverage e-mail a lot. I think the platforms that support the different management companies, and when I mean platforms, I mean the programs like One Slide or Yardi, or these programs where we run our basic, move-ins, vacancies, generate rent split, all those things have had to move more into the virtual area, so I can e-mail a resident a rent receipt. Of course, hard in the middle of all this, is having to make some adjustments to their policies as well. Where they required a web signature before they understand it, they are now placing us in danger as well as their residents, and so now they have to be creative. Maybe it's an electronic signature, maybe it's no signature at all, but an acknowledgment that discussion took place with the resident. These are the day-to-day emergencies that I would say that we're dealing with because of this virus. But it's never going to go back to the way it was. I see us leveraging more and more technology specifically with our older adults to keep them safe and to keep in contact with them. I'm hearing so much. Just flexibility, nimbleness, amazing adaptations from you and your team. Last question for you, Yuri, and it's a tough line. Tell me what keeps you up at night, and how prepared you really feel. What keeps me up at night? One of our communities suffered from the loss of one of our residents recently because this resident took its life. What keeps me up at night is not the loss of my residents because I'm very proud to say to you that we provide quality, affordable housing for them, and we want to see them finish well here in their community. A lot of them don't have anyone to provide them support, to provide them that social contact they need, so we're their family, and we'd want to see them finish well here. In the case where a resident who took his life, what kept me up at night is, why? Let me tell you that one of the areas that has not been discussed is this mental health monster. To me that's even more significant than the current pandemic that we're dealing with. This pandemic has isolated our older adults to levels that I never imagined. That's what keeps me up at night, because they're very alone, they don't have the contact they used to have with their neighbors, and quite frankly, I have to be very careful with the emotional aspect of what you see up at night, because it would be really easy to say look, let's just open the doors, let's have them meet together. I would rather them, I guess, expose one another than them continuing to be alone, but the professional in me has to step away from the emotional, and long-term, I have to care for them, and I can't allow that to happen. What keeps me up at night is, what can we do generate more contact with our residents? Can we reach out to schools that maybe will want to do virtual contact with our residents? We're setting up in one community as a pilot test, we're calling it Teleco TV. It's similar to a hotel. When you go into a hotel, you have [inaudible] videos that inform you on things that are going on. Sometimes you do have a live person that comes on and says, hey, we're having this activity today. We have a community Teleco at Poloma where we're leveraging this technology to see if we can get these videos into each one of the resident's units. Our buildings are capable already, so if we can get them to go to Channel One, the Teleco TV, they're going to be able to see one another, maybe see or engage in classes, engage in information. Those are the things that I think we're leveraging right now, and we're exploring right now to fill that vacuum of social contact that our seniors are dealing with. It is a life or death matter. That's how serious this is, the mental aspect to it. That's where Karina and her team are having to virtually figure out how to wrap those services around the residents one more time the way it used to be, but we can't. How can we do that virtually? I know she's facing a challenge like no other, because she got to keep her workers safe, keep the residents safe, and still try to wrap those services around them. Wow. The work that you all do every single day, it's just incredible, Yuri. Thank you so much for sharing with us today, and for putting so much heart into your work. Thank you, Anna.
