’21 Honoree Katherine Cleaver

“This has been the most challenging year in my professional career hands down, but it’s also been the most rewarding. I’ve been working in Health and Safety and in Emergency Management here at UD for 20 years. Being very reactionary and dealing with the situation at hand is what we do on a daily basis, so crisis management is something I run to, versus run from. It’s just innate in me. I’ve always been that way, and it’s just part of rolling up your sleeves and getting it done. I think the challenging part was just how long it lasted.”

“When you deal with an emergency situation, it could be a day, it could be a couple of days. But dealing with it, day in and day out, for such a long time, revealed to me a lot about tenacity and resilience and adaptation. I definitely got to see it in myself: how deep I really could dig, and how many balls I could keep in the air, how far I could be stretched, so it was definitely enlightening. One really great part of it was the partnership – we were so glad for collaboration – there was certainly no ‘I’ in this pandemic at all. Everyone was doing everything! I was doing things I never thought I would do, from writing a type of protocol I never had to write before, to creating a program from scratch in a very quick time frame, and having to think very creatively after dead ends were reached on how to implement this new normal. We really had to think outside the box. We were hanging on to every word that the Governor was saying. We were scouring all the information from CDC. There were a lot of fast-moving parts, and we just had to roll with it. You were trusting your instincts, and believing in the leadership, leaning on your partners, and collaborating.”

“The entire summer for the Path Forward team was pretty much a 24/7 operation, and you definitely had to pivot. You could plan something, and while you have this path going this way, the guidance would change. We had to completely abandon that, and start from scratch. It was like doing a marathon: you’re running, and you think about the hardship, but you just kind of numb out and just do it, and get through it. The satisfaction was in knowing that it was for something bigger than you – for the University to open, the students to have the best experience possible, and everyone to be safe in the meantime. It was all of those factors rolled into one, and it just became bigger than you, and so you just kept doing it. Everyone, everywhere, was impacted by this.”

“In addition to all the planning, there were many logistics that had to be done on campus. I would meet people in their spaces and help them set it up. We would decide the safest set up and protective measures so staff and students would be as safe as possible. I would literally be on the floor moving stuff, and putting tape down and stickers and signs, and decide ‘Let's move this furniture.’ Some people were surprised I was doing that, but that's part of rolling up the sleeves and getting it done. Many of us were doing that. August was rough! Everyone was burned out. Everyone was exhausted. There was no such thing as vacations or even weekends, really. It was where the rubber meets the road; where all this planning was either going to work, or it wasn't. You're either going to soar or you were going to crash. And a lot of things were last-minute due to our supply chains in the pandemic, and you had to be OK with that, and just have faith that it was going to work. In addition, our normal job duties were kicking back up.”

“You definitely get stretched out of your comfort zone. On the Path Forward team during the Town Halls, you have everyone's attention, and that’s something that I never had before. I had to manage blunt, unsolicited feedback. There were definitely points where I had to not react, but learn from the feedback, not judge, and listen with compassion. It was hard not to take it personally and realize that people are experiencing fear and uncertainty during these unprecedented times that none of us have walked through before. I really had to pull out of my own self so I could feel and understand where they were coming from and take their feedback to heart.”

“We were so immersed in the planning all summer that our plans made sense to us and I had to realize that people were processing this information for the first time. That was definitely a growth experience for me. You do things you’ve never done before, and you realize what your capabilities are. And I think the biggest thing you learn is even if you don’t know how to do something, no matter what it is, you can get through it, you can do it. God puts you through the fire to get rid of the impurities so that you can come out the other side, and that’s sort of what it was like. But I have to tell you, working with the leadership that we have was just absolutely phenomenal. I know I can’t end this without saying how incredible our leadership is.”