To our dear COPE families, friends and supporters,
We have been in touch with our parents and facilitators, our board and committee members, as we worked quickly to make sure that those who needed us the most would have access to their COPE supports. We have almost completed moving all our group meetings onto electronic platforms, and our clinical director, Michelle Graff, and our executive director, Adam Rabinovitch, worked diligently to assure our telehealth support solutions met all the criteria for safe and confidential discussions.
Our board and committee meetings are now all on the Zoom online meeting software and we are making that work as well.
Behind all this action I have a lot of emotions: a deep passion to help our families during this unimaginable time; an awesome respect for our board members and the community members who have given so much of their time as we try to move quickly and seamlessly; grateful for our amazing staff; a powerful confusion since information to guide us seems to change every time we turn on the news; a deep belly fear as we try to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe; an exhausting sense of helplessness which we try to control by getting angry at people who hoard sanitizer and toilet paper; guilt when I apologetically buy some extras as soon as I see them on a shelf; and a sinking feeling that this pandemic, and the health, social and economic havoc it will leave in its wake, is not going away so quickly.
I have always felt that our COPE families are the strongest people I have ever met. I need you all to remember that now. We know what it is like to get the most awful news in the world, and then still wake up the next morning.
This crisis is like that, except it is moving both at lightning speed and glacially slow. This virus came in fiercely and is chewing up so much as it moves through our communities, our country and our lives. And we don’t know when it will stop.
COPE is here. We are a little scared, a little worried, a lot busy, and always hopeful. We have said that no family in our community is alone. That is still true. We have said we are here for our families who need us now, and those who will need us tomorrow. That is still true.
Let’s get through this together.
My best,
Sandy Wolkoff
