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I’d like to share a story about our community, generosity, how Waterloo is responding to #COVID19, and why you should never turn someone down if they offer you lunch. A thread:
About six weeks ago, Rick Baker, CEO @neustyle, @RTPARKUW’s newest tenant, asked if I’d join him for a lunch event with the Centre for Family Business. Mark Weber from @uwaterloo’s @conraduwaterloo School of Business was speaking about hard conversations.
It was a great event, Mark’s talk was fantastic. And I also heard from a family-owned business called Systems Plus ( https://splus.ca/ ) in Baden, which makes bottles and containers for scientific samples. Really cool business and lovely people.
Flash forward to this week. My friend @ZJW_Waterloo_CA reached out to the members of the @citywaterloo Economic Development Advisory Committee, where I am a member for help. Steve Mckeown of @SoColdProducts had made a substantial donation of disinfectant. Ah-mazing!!
One problem – they needed spray bottles to dilute the disinfectant into for distribution to health care providers, so Zach reached out to see if we knew anyone. Lucky, I had lunch with Rick, who was quick to connect me with Sheila, Gary, Chris and Rebecca at Systems Plus.
The Systems Plus team immediately jumped into action and quickly assessed the need and arranged to donate 700 bottles to dilute the disinfectant and get it ready for distribution.
Soon another member of our committee stepped up with a donation of labels for the bottles – important to know what’s actually in there for the people using it!
Thanks to these amazing people, our community is getting a fresh batch of high quality disinfectant out to healthcare providers that desperately need everything they can get.
So if you’re feeling that people don’t care, or if you’re struggling to find good stories to get you through this, or if you just want to know where to direct some gratitude, may I suggest any of the people I mentioned above.
And thanks to Rick at @neustyle for inviting me to lunch. I had no idea it would turn out to be such an important one.
