As spring begins to spring in the Northern Hemisphere, we are now officially two years into this pandemic. I hope that by the time this article is published, we will have moved into an endemic phase, at least in some parts of the globe.

When the CASE Board of Trustees held its meeting in March 2020 in Chicago, we were making decisions about how to respond to a rapidly unfolding crisis—about how to support both CASE itself and CASE member institutions through their immediate challenges. We didn’t spend much energy trying to anticipate when the pandemic would end; we simply put our efforts and intentions into leading our institutions effectively through the rough waters. I remember listening to a podcast early in 2020 that noted that it is human nature to be optimistic. At the beginning of the Second World War in Europe, for example, no one anticipated it would last another five years. In September 1939, many conjectured that the war would be over by Christmas. 

At CASE, we kept a laser focus on our mission and three guiding principles we set that March in Chicago: one, ensuring the health and well-being of our members; two, ensuring the health and well-being of our worldwide staff; and three, ensuring CASE’s fiscal sustainability.