Serving Your Community Through the Pandemic

Maria Gonzalez, the CEO of ClubFitness Greensboro, shares how you can continue serving your community through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Through this crisis, we have been challenged to seek new opportunities to better serve our members and the community at large. Following are specific examples of how we have continued serving our community in uncertain times:

When our club closed due to the pandemic, we knew we had to find a way to keep members engaged with our club so they could continue on their path to health and fitness. When we closed, the first thing we did was launch “ClubFitness Fresh Air,” an outdoor solution that brought group exercise classes, group personal training and select exercise equipment outdoors.

In addition, we built an online library of on-demand classes, as well as offered live online classes to our members and social media followers. These diverse offerings provide ways for us to continue engaging members both in the club, as well as those not comfortable returning. More importantly, we want to ensure we give the community options for staying healthy.

Another opportunity for us to serve our community presented itself at the end of the summer. As we were closing out the last summer camp session, parents expressed concern about their ability to continue working outside the home with schools starting virtually in the fall. For these parents, virtual schooling created a big disadvantage. As we considered the best way to support these parents, we had the idea to form ClubAcademy, a program designed to assist students during their virtual school hours. Parents in our community have been extremely grateful for this service, and we are happy we were able to provide this option.

A third chance to serve our community revealed itself within the swim community. We learned one of our local swim teams was unable to train because both the nearby aquatic center and the university pool were unavailable. Our two facilities were operating on staggered schedules due to low attendance, which allowed us to offer the swim team some pool time. This new partnership with the team led to us bringing in over 80 new swimmers and their families as new members, without adversely affecting the experience of our current members.

Although the pandemic has created many challenges for all of us. You have been presented with new opportunities to continue serving your communities. These opportunities allowed us to continue our mission to improve the overall health of our community.