Fall/Winter 2020
COVID-19 UPDATE Over the past 100 years, Easterseals Michigan has faced many challenges. As with all these challenges, we quickly adapted to ensure that the high-quality services we offer would continue for the people we serve. It was this same commitment to the community that helped us through the COVID-19 outbreak. Immediately we expanded our ability to provide telehealth services. We were already piloting our telehealth platform and this early start allowed us to transition to more telehealth services quickly. We provisioned nearly 350 staff to continue providing essential services to those in need. Since March, we onboarded thousands of people we serve to our telehealth platform providing almost 90,000 sessions, while the demand for our services is ever increasing. The pandemic did not reduce our ability to innovate. We created and hand-delivered dozens of customized kits for the children and their families in Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) therapy, held daily sessions with families so their children wouldn’t regress in treatment; and creatively introduced successful virtual potty-training sessions! Our Contact Center responded to thousands of phone calls and emails from concerned community members and successfully coordinated and connected them to needed resources and services, including onboarding thousands of new people in our services. We never closed our offices; we never stopped serving people; we remained committed to providing life-saving services. This crisis has and will continue to influence how we meet the needs of the community. We have successfully integrated telehealth services into our home, office and community-based services. This greatly enhances our ability to perform outreach and needed services to areas and people that otherwise would not have had access. We thank our supporters, partners, staff, and families for their amazing support. Together we faced a historic event, and together we continue to strengthen the community for generations to come.