Читать книгу Leading with Empathy - Gautham Pallapa - Страница 24

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic, political turmoil, and revelations about systemic racism and sexism have been heart-wrenching for people and their families all over the world. Millions of people have reported that they struggle to put enough food on the table. Just in the United States, over 26 million adults said they could not feed their families properly in 2020 due to hardship⁴⁴ and an additional 24 millions adults are undergoing some form of food insecurity.⁴⁵ Families suffering from unemployment also have had to grapple with an inability to pay rent or mortgage. Studies have shown that renters of color face food and housing hardships, in addition to difficulty covering expenses such as utilities, car payments, or medical expenses.⁴⁶

Over 1.6 billion workers were impacted or unemployed due to the pandemic out of a global workforce of 3.3 billion!⁴⁷ That is nearly half of the global workforce affected or at risk of losing their livelihood. Unemployment rates have jumped since April 2020 to levels not seen since the Great Depression of 1929, and it is depressing to realize that these rates will continue to grow until conditions improve globally.⁴⁸ Job losses have predominantly centered in low-paid industries, part-time jobs, and the gig economy. A recent US Congressional Research Service report stated that part-time workers experienced an unemployment rate almost double that of full-time workers in April 2020⁴⁹ and, as expected, racial and ethnic minorities had high rates of unemployment through all of 2020.

The last two years have been ones of losses, not just in lives but also in jobs, security, safety, belonging, familiarity, love, emotional health, and well-being. People have been afraid to venture outside their homes, and many have become depressed or have severe anxiety bouts. In senior living and care communities, people have been suffering from an atmosphere of fear, from contracting the virus and from the isolation and new realities the pandemic has triggered. Most of us want to step up and contribute to solutions but are hard-pressed to know what we can do as individuals and as long-term care teams.