A Puppy Palooza and how we can remain close during isolation
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On a delightfully sultry day in late August, we gathered as staff members to welcome our new CEO…’s dogs!? Oh yes, we did!
Let us rewind - Hamilton style - and let’s go back to a pre-pandemic world in which as staff members we were preparing to welcome our new CEO Alex Sarian and his wife Aliza to Calgary. At the time, we wanted to throw a party for them in our building sometime after they arrived in Calgary and sometime after Alex’s first day. We had imagined a typical casual and ‘maskless’ gathering with wine, cheese platters, crudités, etc. also known as the usual elements that form a non-profit arts party. Needless to say, Alex’s first day was really different than what we had in mind as by the time he arrived in Calgary our building had closed to the public and only a handful of employees were going to it every day to oversee projects and keep it running while we wait to welcome Calgarians back through our doors (see some of our previous posts about the projects and what it takes to keep the building going while it’s shut down to the public).
Nevertheless, at Arts Commons we always find a way to gather with intentionality, and it is within our culture to always find ways to connect. As we started to settle in our new way of working remotely, we quickly wondered how we could remain socially close while physically distant and to follow the Mayor’s heartfelt Twitter dictum of “clean hands, clear heads, open hearts”. We decided that our monthly birthday celebrations did not need to be cancelled even if we could not meet in the office kitchen and share donuts like we usually do. We moved our staff events to Zoom, and still made the people who had birthdays feel celebrated by delivering treats (safely) to their doorstep and by enlisting local musicians to send in videos of themselves playing “Happy Birthday” for them. Pretty soon, we came up with many more events such as a virtual Pajama Party for National PJ’s day, an online Taco Trivia hangout for Cinco de Mayo. But something was missing, and we felt we could not properly say we had celebrated the arrival of the Sarians to Alberta and to Arts Commons… but just you wait!
There are many things we miss from being at the office, seeing colleagues, having face to face meetings and collaborating with one and other without a screen in between, but as a dog friendly building we also miss having dogs around while we work. Move forward in time to 5 months into the pandemic, and during a team meeting our CFO Colleen Dickson brought up an idea she had a while back to somehow create an event to welcome Alex and Aliza’s adorable dogs Pickle and Olive. That seemed like the perfect event to organize, and after many months of screen time, we needed to bring this to life offline.
We quickly started brainstorming ways to make this happen in a safe way and by following all public health regulations. Thanks to our colleague Brian’s recommendation we settled on going to Place 4 Paws aka a vast, off-leash and sunny Albertan version of a Dog’s Utopia where we could physically distance. We quickly replaced our crudités for safely packaged individual servings of cookies and trail mix; we switched our cheese platters for “pandemic charcuterie boards” otherwise known as Costco snack-packs, and of course, we added delicious peanut butter bacon cupcakes to the menu for the hungry hounds. We played and caught up with one and other while sweating under our masks, and in a very unusual way, we felt back in our office kitchen overlooking Olympic Plaza, eating treats, and connecting once more. Here are some pictures of the day featuring our fluffy colleagues: Olive, Pickle, Keeva, Ellie, Jellybean, Skipper, Missie, Marley, Lucy, Pebble, Tux, and Barkley. We really cannot think of a better way to show Alex and Aliza our Arts Commons hospitality and to secretly tell them that any dog of theirs is a dog of ours.
All pictures are taken by emerging 6 y/o photographer Saphina Spence, my colleague and master of all things digital content, Busola Fapojuwo and yours truly, Celina Vides.
