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The spring of 2021 saw a historic snowstorm impact Texas and other surrounding states. It brought fear and widespread damage to many Texas communities. Residents scrambled to manage power outages, burst pipes, limited grocery store supplies, and other interruptions to their normal lives. Exceptionally low temperatures also put many residents as risk from cold exposure. Helping Texans through this disaster was BCFS Health and Human Services, a nonprofit leader in emergency management and response. The organization is based in Texas and was tasked to help residents and its own staff members to survive the storm and rebound quickly.

The organization’s work extended throughout the state. It worked in San Antonio to help residents combat the cold with medical services, blankets, and other supplies provided through a warming center. It also delivered hundreds of pallets of water to the San Antonio Food Bank and other location organizations to help with limited or interruption municipal water supply issues. BCFS Health and Human Services also provided generators and other support to its various residential services locations throughout Texas. These facilities were already prepared for disasters with ample food and water, but they required electricity in order to care for the youth under their supervision. Many BCFS Health and Human Services staff put in extra hours and worked outside their job descriptions to ensure a certain quality of care.

The organization helped the Breckenridge Village of Tyler (BVT), a nonprofit that provides adult residential care for people with disabilities. The facility lost power due to the storm, and its management team realized it needed to evacuate residents to a warmer facility. It turned to BCFS Health and Human Services for support in the form of emergency generators and setting up a temporary response center within the facility’s chapel until the storm was over and temperatures increased.

Icy road conditions in rural southern Texas counties prompted the organization’s educational services division to respond to various issues such as power outage problems, and widespread flooding that affected facilities including the Red River Center. The organization saw some hopeful moments during this time, including a parishioner that fixed leaks for free, and a plumber that repaired pipes late into the night. The organization’s staff also worked tirelessly throughout this period, many without access to reliable water or power.

 

Parents with school-aged children rapidly adapted to home learning. As quarantine orders came through and school districts shifted to virtual classrooms, parents had to shift their personal and professional lives to help their kids learn. This new dynamic continues to pose challenges for parents who are juggling their jobs, home, and now instruction. Thankfully, organizations such as BCFS System offer parents guidance on the ways they can help kids learn from home without too much stress and anxiety.

The organization states parents should try their best to provide their kids with a dedicated learning space. This area should be free from distractions such as video game consoles or annoying siblings and provide the child with an area where they can focus. Another tip is for kids to use headphones as they’re listening to Zoom calls and other instruction, while also cutting out the sound of other distractions.

Parents can also improve their child’s learning by setting expectations and goals. This could include an expectation for adherence to a daily schedule and goals in terms of grades. These should be established for each individual child, so if a parent has a 1^st grader and a 7^th grader there will of course be different expectations for each. Parents should provide structure to the learning day, but also have some flexibility and be open to changes over time. For example, they might find their child completes homework quickly during the evening, after they’ve had time to play outside and take a break from the screen. Or they might need to adjust expectations about grades after seeing how much their child is struggling with the lack of peer interaction. In either case, it’s important for the parent to act dynamically throughout the school year so they’re offering the optimal support for their learner.

Another tip from BCFS System is for parents to engage their kids in non-traditional learning during quarantine. This could include teaching the kids about the parts of a car engine (using YouTube tutorials as a complement) or discussing how mortgages or mutual funds work as part of financial preparedness learning. Kids of all ages might enjoy cooking lessons with their parents, especially if there’s a dessert course involved. Adding some learning outside of the school district curriculum isn’t intended to add to the child’s stress, but instead it should provide a bonding experience for the parent and child who are trying to make it through a tough quarantine period.

 

Many believe that good writers are able to just turn their pen to any kind of writing but this really isn’t the case. There are some incredible writers out there like Roger Wolfson, who have built a career on their ability to be creative across the entire field of writing. Throughout his career he has been a speech writer, a scriptwriter, an author a political analyst and an essayist who has consistently won praise for his ability to chop and change between different writing styles.

If you are a good writer and you wish to be ambidextrous with regards to where you can dedicate those skills, then the key is to first ensure that you are ready to work on the skills which are required to do so.

Understanding Form

Writing a story and writing an essay are two completely different things and the key change between both styles is the length. Understanding how to write long and short form, and how to still be able to deliver the point accurately and succinctly is a skill which so few of us possess. The reality is that some people are more wordy than others, and that means that timing the word count down and being able to deliver the clear message which you would like to, that is a skill which you have to work on.

Evoking Emotion

If we take two areas of writing such as scriptwriting and speechwriting, then we can see quite in both cases that the idea of evoking emotion is something that is critical to both. With this being said however there are stark contrasts between the two, and the skill is knowing who your audience is and what kind of emotions you are looking to draw out. In a script you are using a character to bring about emotion, so it needs to be real and raw and natural. Conversely when you are writing a script, the majority of that emotion comes not from the speech giver, but from the words which they have in front of them. The key here is to learn how to use characters and words to draw emotion, and how to separate them.

Reporting Speech

We use reported speech in a wide range of situations in writing and the way in which you do it will be critical to the success of your project. Writing speech in a newspaper article is not the same as you do in a script, and that is different from how you would do in a story. What writers do is take the correct amount of speech and create it in a certain way which helps to back up the story which we are telling. In even the world of journalism, this is not about taking speech verbatim, but selecting the right areas of speech to use, to deliver a solid story.

These are the fundamental skills which writers will need to then cross boundaries with their work.

Reimagining customer-centric business planning has been forced into high-gear due to experiences and lessons learned – and continued learning – from last year’s COVID-19 impact on businesses and brands. David Highbloom, a 25-year entrepreneur with extensive experience in business models dependent on the customer service experience, points out that there is a shift taking place today that combines new ways of reaching customers by exploring new business mindsets, methods, and motivations. Additionally, Highbloom mentions that executives must examine the cross-section of technology, human design and contribution, and scalable, agile business models to achieve this shift successfully.

At this point, many industry executives describe business marketing as a blank canvas that is being reinvented and renewed by customer-centric style thinking. At the forefront is the realization that empathy, active listening, and understanding are at the core of reimagining the customer experience. The global pandemic caused companies and brands to listen to their core customer base truly, and in a way, lean in closer to them. This closeness brought everybody, and their needs, into focus and businesses, responded by accelerating their e-commerce channels, implemented curbside pick-up, and in some cases, introduced delivery services. Highbloom says these types of pivots demonstrated the agility businesses could accomplish to make their customers feel safe while still providing them with the products they needed.

A recent article discusses how agility is just the beginning of how businesses will need to focus and enhance the customer experience to achieve real business results. Specialized and personalized services will accelerate, and the competition for making the customer experience easy and safe will rise. Highbloom recommends that businesses take these pendulum swings with a grain of salt and not rush into implementing costly programs that are not tested to provide an appropriate return on the investment.

Highbloom explains that these changes will not happen overnight or in a silo. They will be front and center. Business and industry leaders must address the discipline involved in first changing the mindset. Once this discipline is created, turning that into reliable business processes and habits would lend itself to achieve form, function, and finally, system-wide implementation.

It is both easy and challenging to ask yourself what could be done today to improve the customer experience and reimagine that answer into tangible processes and results. It is the little things done right and done repeatedly that build brand loyalty and create strong customer relationships with a brand or business.

Many of you may not have heard the name, but Roger Wolfson is one of the best writers of our generation and he is a man who has dedicated his life to his craft. Roger began life as an attorney and has since gone on to write for hit TV shows like Fairly Legal and Law & Order, he has sold 8 of his own TV shows to major networks, not to mention his career as a political analyst and speech writer. It would seem that there is nothing that this man cannot turn his hand to and despite having already achieved an incredibly successful career, Roger just keeps on going.

Getting The Energy

Looking at what the man has achieved, it is amazing that he still has the energy to keep on going, to keep on taking new projects on and to keep on branching out to test himself. This energy is very simple to explain and it is passion. This is not the passion for success or the passion for money, this is the passion which he has towards his craft, and it is this which keeps him going and keep pushing him on to see what is next.

Fearless Approach

Something which Roger has grown a reputation for in the industry is his fearlessness, and this can be seen by the career choices which he has made. Whereas so many writers get comfortable in a particular role, Roger has always sought to push the envelope and to discover all of the ability which he has. It is for this reason why he will consistently reach out into other areas of writing, and take on massive projects which may overwhelm some. What we realize with people like Roger is that to them, they are not taking on risks, to him, not going after these big projects and these new ideas is where the real risk lies.

Inspiring

There is no doubt that Roger Wolfson is one of the most inspiring writers if our generation and thanks to his fearless approach and relentless energy, he has built this reputation for himself. What Roger has also done however is sought to inspire others, evidence of this can be seen in the fact that he has become a writing instructor to many budding writers. This is something which many who have found the levels of success which Roger has just don’t do. For Roger however, giving back to this industry is essential and that is why he gives up his time to help others.

To any young writers out there, this is the perfect example of someone who has done it all in the industry and who has blazed a trail for the rest of you all to follow. Roger has used his skill to create some incredible entertainment and even now he continues to push the envelope and find new and exciting projects which he can work on. It is a testament to the man to say that his career is far from over, and we can’t wait to see what is next.