By Mary-Claire Burick, President, Rosslyn Business Improvement District
How do you reopen a neighborhood in a safe and engaging way during a global pandemic? At the Rosslyn Business Improvement District (BID), we couldn't have imagined this challenge a few months ago. However, as a community organization with a mission to enhance, grow, and connect the neighborhood, we knew we had to step up and figure it out!
How do you reopen a neighborhood in a safe and engaging way during a global pandemic? At the Rosslyn Business Improvement District (BID), we couldn't have imagined this challenge a few months ago. However, as a community organization with a mission to enhance, grow, and connect the neighborhood, we knew we had to step up and figure it out!
The answer soon became our neighborhood-wide Rosslyn Ready initiative which was designed to help us prepare the Rosslyn neighborhood, so that we were ready to welcome everyone back to work, to their favorite restaurants, and to our outdoor spaces whenever they were ready to return.
Our neighborhood is made up of 25,000 employees, 15,000 residents, and 1.2 million visitors a year, so our first step was to listen to the needs of our community. We heard the concerns of Rosslyn’s property managers, retailers, business owners, and restaurants and realized that they needed help thinking through how to develop a plan that would include HR considerations, how to address challenging legal questions, and guidance on how to restructure their offices in a clean and safe manner.
So we tapped experts in industrial hygiene, capital management, and HR considerations to help us create toolkits and webinars for our businesses and restaurants that allowed them to make their own tailored plans for reentry. With so much information and evolving guidance out there, we knew the best way to help was by curating information in an organized way to make a confusing process just a little bit easier for our community.
From there, we set out to get the neighborhood physically ready as people began to ease back into their offices and community spaces. With the introduction of Rosslyn Ready in the neighborhood, the BID installed over 1,000 new signs, stickers, banners, and instructional, yet light-hearted, materials in high-traffic areas to encourage physical distancing and mask use, and welcome people back into Rosslyn.
These physical installments use fun visual cues to remind people that while we’re working toward getting back to normal, safety has to remain our top priority – and each of us must do our part. Our Rosslyn Ambassadors and BID team continued our efforts by increasing our cleaning and sanitation of Rosslyn’s outdoor spaces and public amenities like tables, chairs, plazas, and parks.
With these physical assets in place and our digital resources available, we felt a responsibility to share what we had learned with the broader community, so, in the spirit of regionalism, we made our “Ready for Reentry” webinars and resources on space management, cleaning protocols, and HR considerations available for all to download free of charge. We encourage you to sign up for immediate access to our toolkits, webinar recordings, new announcements, and upcoming virtual events.
It’s our hope that our efforts will begin to create an environment of mutual learning and growth not only for the stakeholders here in Rosslyn, but across our region, and that this will ultimately better position all of our businesses, restaurants, and retailers for a successful reentry into this new world. Rosslyn is ready when you are!
Our neighborhood is made up of 25,000 employees, 15,000 residents, and 1.2 million visitors a year, so our first step was to listen to the needs of our community. We heard the concerns of Rosslyn’s property managers, retailers, business owners, and restaurants and realized that they needed help thinking through how to develop a plan that would include HR considerations, how to address challenging legal questions, and guidance on how to restructure their offices in a clean and safe manner.
So we tapped experts in industrial hygiene, capital management, and HR considerations to help us create toolkits and webinars for our businesses and restaurants that allowed them to make their own tailored plans for reentry. With so much information and evolving guidance out there, we knew the best way to help was by curating information in an organized way to make a confusing process just a little bit easier for our community.
From there, we set out to get the neighborhood physically ready as people began to ease back into their offices and community spaces. With the introduction of Rosslyn Ready in the neighborhood, the BID installed over 1,000 new signs, stickers, banners, and instructional, yet light-hearted, materials in high-traffic areas to encourage physical distancing and mask use, and welcome people back into Rosslyn.
These physical installments use fun visual cues to remind people that while we’re working toward getting back to normal, safety has to remain our top priority – and each of us must do our part. Our Rosslyn Ambassadors and BID team continued our efforts by increasing our cleaning and sanitation of Rosslyn’s outdoor spaces and public amenities like tables, chairs, plazas, and parks.
With these physical assets in place and our digital resources available, we felt a responsibility to share what we had learned with the broader community, so, in the spirit of regionalism, we made our “Ready for Reentry” webinars and resources on space management, cleaning protocols, and HR considerations available for all to download free of charge. We encourage you to sign up for immediate access to our toolkits, webinar recordings, new announcements, and upcoming virtual events.
It’s our hope that our efforts will begin to create an environment of mutual learning and growth not only for the stakeholders here in Rosslyn, but across our region, and that this will ultimately better position all of our businesses, restaurants, and retailers for a successful reentry into this new world. Rosslyn is ready when you are!
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