Getting Back on the Bull in Durham: Giving Small Businesses The Green Light
As local Durham businesses endured the pandemic, many experienced empty storefronts and stagnant sales. To preserve their physical and fiscal safety, businesses have started to close, leading to hundreds of lost jobs and high levels of anxiety for employers and employees. Greenlight Durham has sought to mitigate this problem for businesses through providing access to coordinated symptom monitoring, testing, and recovery services to help businesses continue to operate safely financially and physically.
Our Phase 1 Work
Through our app, small business employees have been able to ‘check-in’ daily and get access to information about medical and social services including access to Curamericas community health workers based in Durham. Individual screening has allowed us to quickly direct symptomatic individuals to undergo COVID-19 evaluation and testing at a nearby testing facility to lower the chance for spread among employees and customers.
“Greenlight has helped streamline our process of daily health screenings for all of our employees and made it easy to find resources for testing when needed. This has reduced our administrative time, allowing us to better focus on how we can improve our business and make sure we’re keeping our employees and customers safe and happy.”
Chris Creech, The Glass Jug Beer Lab
Greenlight Durham has also created playbooks and scorecards with industry-specific best practices to guide organizations in implementing COVID-19 precautionary measures. These playbooks provide businesses both preventative and responsive measures to help their business operate safely and effectively during the pandemic. Our playbooks are based on the Greenlight Swiss Cheese Model of Defense, where we employ a myriad of prevention strategies together to limit transmission to minute levels. To access our playbook please click here and to access our scorecard please click here.
Finally, Greenlight Durham has also partnered with the Durham Chamber of Commerce, Downtown Durham, and Discover Durham to host webinars for businesses on these best practice guidelines. To further disseminate information Greenlight sent a weekly newsletter to business owners and employees that featured financial resources for small businesses, testing locations and updates, and any relevant news stories. To sign up for our newsletter please click here!
“The playbook and access to care resources, including testing, have also helped provide a streamlined process for anyone experiencing symptoms or exposure. Most recently, the Greenlight newsletters and information sessions have helped provide valuable answers to our leaders and employees regarding testing and vaccine availability.”
Elizabeth Stillwell, Counter Culture Coffee
Our Phase 1 Results
Users
Through our Phase 1 work, we’ve been able to onboard over 65 businesses and 8 schools onto our platform, totaling to over 3,400 active users across these organizations — 1506 users among Durham businesses, and 1914 among Durham schools.
Webinars
In collaboration with Duke Infectious Disease physicians, we hosted 2 webinars about best practices during COVID-19 to business owners and management — there were nearly 100 people in attendance at these events. For Durham schools, we were also able to collaborate with administrators to host town halls to help answer questions related to COVID-19 — approximately 50 individuals were present at these events in total.
Newsletters
Each week, we provide up-to-date information via our newsletters which include information on COVID-19 vaccine rollout updates, testing location and event information, internal Greenlight updates, and COVID-19 policy synthesis to approximately 200 business and community leaders.
While our numbers speak for themselves, Greenlight Durham has had an impact further than what the numbers can tell. By taking care of businesses’ COVID-19 safety problems, we allow business owners to get back to doing what they do best: running businesses to provide services that the local community loves.
“Greenlight has been a godsend for the restaurant community and has helped enormously for our business to reopen after a possible exposure and stay open safely. We have answers at our fingertips for testing, next steps involved after exposure and safe measures to reopen. The app is so informative, and has all resources you require, yet it does not overload you with info, and it certainly puts your mind at ease knowing [Greenlight Professionals] are always a phone call/email away.”
Malachy Noone, Bull McCabes
Our Future Work
As vaccinations become more widely available, Greenlight is working on combating vaccine hesitancy in the local community and developing documentation technology around vaccinations to create efficiency in the vaccination process.
To address vaccine hesitancy in the general public, and especially in marginalized communities, we have begun hosting vaccine town halls — creating space for medical experts to directly interface with the community. We have recruited a team of 6 (and rapidly growing) physicians to facilitate these town halls in collaboration with a community liaison.To learn more about our town halls please visit https://greenlightdurham.com/events & https://www.facebook.com/greenlightcares/events!
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