Welcome to our Special May CoWorker eMagazine.
One Year Ago, Our World Changed Forever:5 Lessons for the Future of Work & Learning
Sitting at a lunch table, I listened with intrigue to a very keen business executive from the U.S share his vision for our co-working business expansion into the north eastern U.S. He had contacted me out of the blue. They owned 16 malls he declared and sought out my company after extensive research as the ideal partner. He did his homework as he pulled out a glossy report on us that included a large coloured layout of a premium mall. He pointed to our full coloured Mindshare logo that was situated next to the Apple store as to the proposed location. As founder of Canada’s first shopping mall located coworking space, this seemed like a great expansion opportunity into the U.S. That same afternoon, we got word from our mall management that our world was about to change forever–immediate full closure.
This was our World War III. The battle against COVID-19 that continues to linger. I remain hopeful and grateful daily despite what still feels like a bad dream, that will go away sooner than later with the vaccine coming. I always felt grateful for how safe Canada felt, having heard war stories from my immigrant parents growing up. The unknowns resulted in a sense of panic at times early on during the pandemic as we tried to make sense of it at all.