Dear staff,
Today is the Winter Solstice, when we will experience our shortest day and longest night of the year. In a year marred by sickness, financial hardship, and tremendous uncertainty, this day of celestial darkness feels like a metaphor for 2020. However, even in this dark year, you have proven that there is something good to be found in every bad situation.
Watching each of you rise to the challenges presented over the past several months has been awe-inspiring. You adapted to the sudden need to work from your homes, transforming spare bedrooms and kitchen tables into home offices. You found silver linings in extra time spent with family and taking your home office into the great outdoors when the weather cooperated. You found new ways to reinforce your connections to one another with Zoom get-togethers, Mitel Connect chats, and through Slack and text messages. You remained productive and innovative when it would have been easy and understandable to feel helpless and ineffective. You rolled with leadership while we figured out how to keep buses on the road and drivers and passengers safe, implementing new cleaning protocols and greatly reduced capacity. Your dedication and commitment to Jaunt and those we serve humbles me.
While today may be the shortest day of the year, that also means that for the next several months there will be more minutes of daylight and fewer minute of darkness each day. And that feels like an equally valid metaphor for what lies ahead. With a vaccine on the way, and the knowledge that we have sustained Jaunt’s place as a persistent force of good in our community, I have every confidence that we will enter into the new year as an even stronger organization, forged in the fires of 2020.
As you turn your attention toward the final weeks of the year, I hope you will find peace and comfort in the knowledge that you are an integral part of an organization that provides an essential service to our community. I am so proud of and grateful for each of you, and I look forward to what we can accomplish together in the coming year.
With my sincerest appreciation and warmest holiday wishes to you and your loved ones,
Karen