Photo courtesy of Volvo Canada
In response to a global health emergency unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes, a small group of friends including St. Paul’s alumnus Laurie Dillon-Schalk (BA ’92) formed a complex grassroots organization and logistics chain practically overnight. That organization Conquer COVID-19 gained national and international media recognition for helping to save countless lives and inspiring hope and optimism for thousands of Canadians right across the country. We recently caught up with Laurie Dillon-Schalk to learn more.
Laurie Dillon-Schalk (BA ’92) is a career marketing and advertising executive who recently founded Social Wisdom, a boutique data intelligence agency that analyzes cultural and consumer trends. When COVID-19 began dominating headlines and social media feeds right before the world went into lockdown in February and March 2020, Laurie was tapping trees at her family maple syrup farm in Bobcaygeon, Ontario.
Through her work, Laurie saw the seriousness of COVID-19 coming, yet she did not expect tranquil Bobcaygeon, Ontario to become one of Canada’s first epicentres of the deadly virus. Near the end of March 2020, Pinecrest Nursing Home was the site of Ontario’s largest and deadliest outbreak at the time, with 28 residents eventually succumbing to COVID-19 by the end of April. Bobcaygeon, normally known for being the subject of its namesake Tragically Hip song had become the focus of national media attention. According to Laurie, the tragedy at Pinecrest helped spark an urgency to grow beyond a GTA effort into Ontario, then other provinces.
“Every day another person was dying. Although I didn’t know anyone personally, it was a very emotional time because the entire town was grieving, and while COVID would ravage more towns – in March there was no help, no PPE, no knowledge of the virus” she said.
During this time, Laurie had a chance to catch up with a group of six well-connected friends, and their conversation led to a discussion about the pandemic and the dire shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) available to front line workers and medical professionals. One of the friends on the call, Sulemaan Ahmed spoke about how he was getting calls from family in the medical profession saying that they were running out of PPE, and that if this wasn’t taken care of, we would all be in trouble. Laurie, Sulemaan and the others knew they had to do something before it was too late. Together they founded Conquer COVID-19, a volunteer-driven grassroots organization, focused on the procurement of PPE.
Extraordinary times call for unconventional approaches
Governments in Canada and around the world faced a massive problem when the global pandemic began rapidly depleting domestic PPE stocks while simultaneously putting the brakes on the global supply chain. The Conquer COVID-19 team knew that if they were to help solve this problem, they would need to be unconventional in their approach. Through Sulemaan’s connections in the medical field, the team heard that one of the issues facing healthcare workers was that they were attempting to limit exposure to infected patients in the ICU to protect PPE supply.
Baby monitors offered a quick and low-cost solution that would allow medical staff to communicate with patients while limiting exposure time. So Laurie and the team started using Facebook and social media to collect them. “I collected 30 monitors from my first Facebook post, but St. Michael’s hospital asked for 50!”
To collect the amount of personal protective equipment that was being requested, Laurie and the Conquer COVID-19 team started going directly to the CEO’s of large companies to source greater quantities of equipment. One of their first successes was a large donation of baby monitors from Toys ‘R’ Us, which helped pave the path for corporate partnerships fueling Conquer COVID-19’s rapid growth.
Within a week of establishing Conquer COVID-19, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave legitimacy to the organization by mentioning its efforts in a nationally broadcast press briefing. After that, the organization really started to scale. Within twenty-four hours, Gregg Tilson, founder and acting CIO, created a website that Laurie jokes was the “Tinder of PPE” because it asked two simple questions: “what do you need?” and “how can you help?”. A few short weeks later, what had started as a virtual conversation among a small group of friends, had become a nation-wide grassroots movement with more than 120 volunteers procuring and distributing PPE to essential workers.
Together, the founders and other volunteers established organizational structure by defining responsibilities and assigning tasks in key areas: legal, medical advisory, distribution, partnerships and solicitation all with an aim to scale up impact quickly.
The hours were long; it was common for Laurie and others to spend twenty-two hours per day seeking out and delivering PPE. In some cases they partnered with large corporations, in others they discovered more unconventional sources like nail salons, tattoo parlours, and construction crews. Volunteers across Canada ran PPE drives for specifically requested items and racked up tens of thousands of kilometres in eighteen vehicles donated by Volvo, delivering PPE to those who needed it in nine provinces and one territory.
The power of star power
The real solution came when Hayley Wickenheiser came on board”, said Laurie. Wickenheiser, now retired from hockey and training to be a medical doctor, had spent much of the early days of the pandemic in emergency rooms, gaining first-hand insight into the PPE challenge. She tweeted a “laundry list” of items that her colleagues needed which caught the eye of Conquer COVID-19 CEO Sulemaan Ahmed. Sulemaan reached out and Wickenheiser quickly joined the Conquer COVID-19 movement.
With Hayley Wickenheiser on board, Conquer COVID-19 started to attract major donors sympathetic to our vision of getting PPE to health in the community - most notably from Fiona McKean and Tobi Lütke (founder and CEO of Shopify) through the couple’s Thistledown Foundation which led to our first major financial donation - $1,000,000.
Soon after Wickenheiser joined, Laurie expressed that she was struggling with distribution. Despite the generosity of Volvo, they still had issues moving pallets of PPE and getting to remote towns and First Nations communities across Canada. Less than twenty-four hours later, Hayley introduced Laurie to Purolator, and the logistics giant quickly committed to doing whatever they could to help essential workers. “Hayley was like a tornado that helped get the organization to the next level”, said Laurie. With Purolator’s support Conquer COVID-19 was able to reach far-flung corners of the country quickly and more easily.
As stars align, Canadian actor and entrepreneur, Ryan Reynolds, happens to be a friend of Wickenheiser. After seeing her tweet about the need for PPE, Reynolds reached out with an offer to assist. Reynolds then re-tweeted a Wickenheiser post about a PPE collection drive for Conquer COVID-19 and stated that “this is how damn miracles happen!”.
Conquer COVID-19 produced plain-looking black t-shirts with their name emblazoned in white block letters to help with visibility at their PPE drives and eventually began selling the shirts as a way to raise much-needed funds for further PPE procurement. Reynolds posted a comical video on social media while wearing one of the shirts, which he deemed boring and unremarkable. But his message was that as many people as possible needed to buy a shirt to help protect frontline workers and medical personnel to get us back to boring.
The viral video helped generate sales of more than 23,000 t-shirts and resulted in global recognition for the team’s efforts. “We could have sold more t-shirts”, Laurie said, “but it was getting crazy and we were getting ready to wrap-up our efforts”. In the end, the shirts were anything but boring. They became a rallying cry for people who needed hope and meaning during a time when mainstream and social media were delivering so many negative and frightening stories about the deadly virus.
“The shirts tapped into something incredible”, said Laurie. “It wasn’t just about fundraising anymore, it was about conquering the virus and helping others selflessly, it was true altruism. Hospital staff started buying shirts as gifts for their colleagues, cancer patients were buying t-shirts to wear during their treatment sessions, and young children were using their allowances to support our effort”.
The legacy of Conquer COVID-19
With a mix of selfless hard work, good fortune and star power, Laurie and the Conquer COVID-19 team collected donations of more than 730,000 PPE items, raised $2.38 million for PPE procurement and traveled tens of thousands of kilometres across our country delivering PPE and hope to vulnerable communities and front line workers. Their story was shared in more than 700 media articles by publications which included Forbes, CTV, the Toronto Star, and Sportsnet.
Simply put, their results were amazing, so it is not surprising that people want to know how they did it. Laurie says the question she gets asked most is “how did you build a 120-person organization that raised $2.38 million dollars and created a national supply chain inside 4 months?”.
The answer she says, “is not without challenges, and not without help”. But she is quick to point out one secret ingredient that made problem-solving much easier: team diversity. “There is no secret that this virus is making inequities in society more visible. How poorly we take care of our elderly. How unsupported vulnerable populations are. When you have a team that’s 70% BIPOC and 50% women, you can do incredible things!”
Another key to their success was alignment. “Many organizations tend to have difficulty growing because of lack of alignment,” said Laurie, but “when everyone is singing from the same song sheet, you can move very fast”.
Finally, the team remained grounded and focused on the tasks at hand. Even though they benefited greatly from the support of huge stars like Wickenheiser and Reynolds and were lauded publicly by politicians like Doug Ford and Justin Trudeau, the entire team “parked their egos at the door, rolled up their sleeves, and got the work done”.
The Conquer COVID-19 team recognized that they accomplished something remarkable during a remarkably challenging time and hope that their experience can inspire others to think big and act quickly in the face of a huge social problem like a global pandemic. So, one final achievement, perhaps even their legacy is a guide to grassroots mobilization that Laurie has written. The Conquer COVID-19 Playbook: How to mobilize a citizen response to a global pandemic has been made freely and publicly available.
We at St. Paul’s are thrilled to know that Laurie was a key part of the Conquer COVID-19 movement and we hope her story will inspire other alumni and future students alike to think and act big in the face of serious social problems like COVID-19.