Over the past year, our work quickly and significantly shifted from in-person visits, meetings and trainings to completely virtual operations. Deciding when and how we’ll begin resuming in-person activities will not be such a guttural shift. Plus, we’ve learned a lot of new ways of working and engaging families, some of which will be around for the foreseeable future. Instead we’ve developed a series of considerations, relied on nationally recognized decision guides and created a voluntary vaccine policy for our employees. 

 

Our focus is on respecting and protecting our coworkers and partners, which is why we’re being deliberate in both our vaccination and in-person decisions. We also know that each agency, affiliate and partner must make decisions based on their specific needs and community focus. For Families Forward, this is what we believe will work for us. We also know we have to be ready to make adjustments, or even change course, based on how plans translate to actions and operations.   

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Highlights 

• For our voluntary vaccine policy, all employees are encouraged, but not mandated to receive vaccinations such as COVID-19 and influenza. As part of this policy, we’ve made the decision to not host any in-person trainings until at least January 2022. Also, regardless of vaccine decision, all staff are expected to adhere to masking and social distancing protocols as recommended by the CDC and Virginia Department of Health. 

• Our considerations in resuming in-person activities include workforce assessments, local COVID-19 conditions, our physical workplace readiness and the understanding we’ll have to adapt and adjust as needed. 

 

Because we know you’re making many of the same decisions, we want to share our considerations and vaccine policy as well as resources we found helpful.