Aspen’s Group Care, Foster Care, Sustainable Families and In-Home Family Support programs are essential services and must continue. This continuation of services has caused increased staffing and financial challenges and we anticipate a long journey ahead.

We have a unique challenge of many staff working from home, while we ask others to be physically present for youth in our care. As our remote teams explore using technology to interact with program participants, others need to be present in spaces such as group homes. With staff required to self-isolate at the first sign of symptoms, we are needing to re-deploy staff from other programs to step in and support the group homes.

The balance of these two situations is resulting in increased expenses for telecommunications and video conferencing as well as increased staffing costs to compensate staff appropriately for working the front line in our essential services programs. When you combine these increased expenses with the reality of cancelling two fundraising events, we are looking to our community for increased support.