From Dayspring’s Founder and Principal Consultant, Chi-Ming Chien
To our clients, partners, vendors, and friends,
We appear potentially to be in a unique time in our global existence relative to the rest of the last century. I’ve reflected that we’re all people who are accustomed to linear change—shifts that happen gradually, and generally predictably, over time–who suddenly find ourselves in a world of exponential change. And we’re struggling to grapple with the implications but trying collectively to move quickly in order to protect the most vulnerable.
In light of the COVID-19 crisis, Dayspring’s leadership team and staff have been having conversation about how we continue our vision—in the context of these changed circumstances—to embody business done well within our workplace, within the marketplace and relative to our community.
Our workplace and our services to our clients
Beginning March 9, following guidance from San Francisco county, the vast majority of our staff have been working from home in order to help the broader effort to reduce the vectors of transmission within our community. We’ll continue to make slight adjustments to our workspaces, but we’ve made the transition seamlessly and fully expect that we can continue to reliably support our clients in the ways that they’ve come to expect from our team. For the time being, we expect that any in-person meetings will be converted to online meetings.
The applications and websites that we host for many of our clients are on remote infrastructure with the underlying services managed by Amazon Web Services, Heroku, or Salesforce. These services have robust business continuity plans and we expect no issues.
Within our community
We realize that, because of the nature of our work, we can continue to do it without much change. We also realize that this is a privilege that is not uniformly shared. Core to Dayspring’s values has always been a commitment to our local community. As a result:
- We’re reaching out to the borrowers from our joint Neighbor Fund initiative with Redeemer Community Church to see if there are ways that we can support these small businesses, many of whom may be immediately impacted by enforced closures or other changes to daily life.
- We’re also in conversation with Rise University Preparatory, the independent, neighborhood school we support (with tutoring and curriculum support as well as financially) as they move to distance learning and face other challenges that the situation brings on. 80% of the scholars of the school are first-generation college-goers or come from households with very modest incomes.
- We’ve also initiated with Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center’s Bayview branch, with whom we’ve partnered in support of small businesses.
- And we’re in conversation with our longtime partners Redeemer Community Church with whom (in more normal times) we share a physical facility in order to discuss other ways of caring for our community.
Supporting you
Finally, we’d also really like to hear if there are ways that we can support you that go beyond the normal. Please do reach out to us at Dayspring.
We hope that you, your team, and your loved ones are keeping healthy during this time. We’re grateful for our partnership and relationship with you.
Warm regards,
Chi-Ming Chien