 Whenever there would be any really catastrophe that was in the movies or on the air, she would say, always look for the helpers. There will always be helpers. Welcome to Values. I'm Shaquille DeLal. This week we're interviewing helpers, people who are responding to the coronavirus pandemic in ways that serve the community despite the challenges that are involved. Today I'm here with Jessica Collins of the Longmont YMCA. Jessica, thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. Can you tell me about your responsibilities at the YMCA? I'm the Executive Director of the Longmont Branch and we're part of the Greater Northern Colorado YMCA, which includes Lafayette Boulder, Longmont, and soon Johnstown. How many people do you have working with you at the YMCA? Our YMCA Association has over 600 employees. How many of them are full-time and how many are part-time? It's about an 80-20 split. 20% full-time employees and about 80% are part-time. So we're here specifically today to talk about childcare and the important childcare services that the YMCA provides. How many children does the YMCA typically serve? Hundreds. Hundreds on a daily basis. The YMCA is the largest provider of childcare in the nation. And how many children does the Longmont YMCA serve? We typically in our preschool we have over 100 children enrolled and on our before and after school on a regular basis about 30 to 40 children. So you're here today to talk about the help that you can provide to the public. So can you tell me about how many children you have in your childcare programs right now? Well currently we're open and accepting whoever needs help. We want to make sure that families that are underserved, families that have professionals you know within their family that need to be a part of the emergency services efforts. We're making sure that we are there for them and providing care for any of those essential personnel. We will continue to take enrollment until people don't need us any longer. And since those programs are canceled for the foreseeable future until this settles down what is there anything that people who signed up for those should be doing? We are doing our best to continue to update information on our website. We have had a lot of phone calls and we are doing our best to make sure that people receive credits when they need to and also communicating to everybody that will be here when this settles the why is still here the why has been a part of the community for over 175 years and we look forward to continuing to serve people in need. Back to your staff you mentioned that you have a lot of part-time and full-time staff. How are your staffing levels being affected by the coronavirus? In a big way we just had a phone call today that is discussing who is going to be working when and how and how can we limit the contact between staff and what are our critical services that we need to keep going. So when we're ready we can open and have everybody back into the facility. So it's being looked at day to day. We're continuing to provide information and updates to our staff team so they know that I mean we're here for them just the same. If the public wanted to offer you help how could they do that? We are asking that members continue their membership. We have a lot that comes in that is drafted on a monthly basis and people that are continuing their membership we will send them a tax receipt for that donation because that helps us continue to operate. Even though nobody's coming in utilizing the gym we still have lights that are on. We are still providing critical care for families in need and if people continue paying their membership we're going to be able to continue doing that. Does that mean that you can use membership money to support your child care services? We're using all of our operations to support child care right now. We are jumping in that gap with both feet and making sure that sleeves are rolled up and we're ready to serve people that need help. If someone wanted to reach you and offer your help what's the best way for them to do that? Our website go to our website staff contacts are there emails phone calls we're taking all the all of the information that we can and trying to help as many people as we can. So if people could reach out that would be wonderful and we will try to plug them in the best way that we can. Jessica thank you for your time and your effort please stay healthy. Thank you thank you for this opportunity you too.