A Note From The President:

When we started 2020, we were remodeling our Annapolis office space, looking forward to expanding our on-water training, and were ready for a promising year. Things came to a crashing halt in early March, as Covid hit the U.S. One day we were making travel plans for spring conferences, the next day we were trying to figure out how to have everyone work from home.

We really did not have an idea how things would pan out—as it happened, boating turned out to be one of the primary activities that people were able to do during the pandemic. While on-water training was put on hold, thousands of people took up our online offerings new to boating. We were swamped! The increased use of our services, the remote nature of the work force and the restrictions placed on everyone by the pandemic forced us to reexamine how we conducted business—things that worked pre-Covid simply had to be changed to meet the current customer needs and the realities of the work environment.
Chris

We re-worked the Online Courses to make them easier for students to navigate, which helped reduced our staff customer support workload. We shifted on-water training from an event-based model where Foundation staff attended, to using partners to host and do the training. And LOTS of using Zoom, Microsoft Teams, WebEx and every other form of distance communication you can think of. Fortunately the Foundation has a very talented and resilient staff—truly the best in boating! We also invested heavily in technology to help manage the increased number of people we were helping on a day-to-day basis. We learned how to communicate and work differently, and we’ve emerged better for it.

So the Pandemic was certainly an interesting time for us—It introduced many new people to our services, it forced us to change out of inefficient processes, and how to work with a remote staff. We have emerged a much better organization, as I hope you will see in our annual report.