From the moment we got into this crisis, it took us some time to understand that the existential heart of the Scout movement had been taken from us.”
The field responded much more quickly than we did. The children understood that we would move everything to the virtual space, with which we the adults were not as familiar. It took us 48 hours to move all the guiding activities to the virtual space and we created a new arena where we operated the whole array of activities virtually.
The insight that we were really at the start of a huge crisis happened on the eve of Pesach, when we understood that our Pesach operations were canceled and that we were in the middle of a rolling crisis that imposes challenges and difficulties we had never encountered before. This also meant a heavy economic crisis, because of the cancellation of activities and cuts in government funding, and therefore we were forced into a move toward freezing activities and furloughing staff.
It is clear to us now that our reality has changed. We will be meeting in small groups for a long time. The whole organization is learning to work with a much thinner headquarters staff and with fewer meetings in the field. And remember, this is an organization that is usually based on longstanding traditions.
Our decision-making processes have become much faster. But that doesn’t dissipate the fog, and that’s the key problem. We are coping each morning with what each day brings, and we are only able to define what the next day will look like.
Before the crisis, I was in a very strategic place, thinking and planning for the long term. And suddenly: boom. Everything gets put in the drawer. To reopen the drawer, the boat needs to be sailed into a safe harbor. And therefore, right now, we are totally in survival mode. When we get to a safe harbor, we will open the files again and start planning for the coming decades.