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balanced budgets, so there was the finan- cial consideration as well. How much was this going to cost, where were we going to get our resources and PPE? We had to do all that while trying to shift 13,000 students to online learning with the uncertainty about what tomorrow was going to look like. All those worst-case scenarios ran through my head, and that weighed heav- ily. There was a sense of doubt. Values-wise, it was the right thing to do, but it was more about: could we get people in, and what if it came at the expense of getting my day job done? It came down to a question of what type of an institution we were going to be. The small core leadership team met online and we talked through everything. It was a diffi- cult decision in the sense that we knew the risk, but it was simple in that we agreed, "We've talked about our values, now it's time to walk the walk." So, we said OK. We deployed another team to figure out how to safely open 13 kitchens. We went to our vendors and asked if they would give us food at cost or donate, and we went to Fraser Valley farms to try to get whatever we could. What started on April 6 was creating 2,000 meals three times a week for 12 weeks. So, over 72,000 meals. Some of those kitchens ran for 10 hours a day. We got our chef instruc- tors to take on the kitchen role. We were able to reassign our custodial staff to do THE WORST DAY ON MY JOB has to be during the pandemic, by a long shot. We were in the middle of shutting our cam- puses down, pivoting to online—and figur- ing out our applied training programs (how do you teach nurses how to use a needle online?). We had all these challenges about how we could keep our institution going. On March 21, I received a call from the City of Vancouver. They were facing a potential food crisis for the Downtown Eastside residents in single-room occu- pancy hotels (SROs). How were they going to get food without interacting with others? The city wanted to get commercial kitch- ens going but couldn't have 10 people in one space. So, they asked me if I could open our kitchens. Here I am shutting our institution down, and we have the city calling us up, saying, "Can you open your kitchens so we can keep our community alive?" It felt surreal. This was the hardest day for a few reasons. I was a new president. I barely knew everybody's name and so there was the uneasiness of not knowing what sort of ship you have and needing to guide it. I'm also married to a nurse who works at Coastal Health, so I knew how much fear there was within the institution about COVID. There was the safety factor too. The last thing I wanted was someone with COVID potentially dying. And though the government stepped up, we all had to run KITCHEN QUESTION When Ajay Patel was first recruited for a vice-presidency role at Vancouver Community College (VCC) in May 2019, he didn't expect to become interim president in less than six months. "It's kind of like coming home, being an East Van boy all my life," he laughs. But right after he started the presidency permanently in January 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. And when the City of Vancouver approached him two months later to open VCC's downtown kitchens to feed at-need residents of the Downtown Eastside, he had to weigh the risks. —As told to Sandrine Jacquot W orst Day o n t he Jo b packaging in a different room. Our building services contractors stepped up to deliver the meals. It was a defining moment. There are still days when I wonder how it happened. It really showed what can happen when a community comes together. It was one of the most meaningful acts of service because at that early stage it kept individuals safe but also kept their dignity. It was also defining on a personal level, and it would become the foundation for how we did everything else—like setting up our COVID testing facilities later that year. That was one of my biggest takeaways. If you're going to make decisions, lean into your values because it's easy to live values when you really believe in them. You also need a trusted team. Not one person in leadership said anything like, "What are you doing?" They all said this was the right thing to do if we were going to really live our values. It took a lot of courage on everybody's part, especially when so many of our col- leagues were going through their own chal- lenges. But they also had the opportunity to take pride in what we were doing. In times of crisis, we didn't close our doors—we opened them wider. It's something that I'm very proud of and something the institution and com- munity should be proud of as well. This interview has been edited and condensed. 66 B C B U S I N E S S . C A J U LY/A U G U S T 2 0 2 5

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