BC Business
For Luke Harrison, president of Catalyst Community Developments Society, the pandemic has yielded some unexpected benefits.
Luke Harrison, president of Catalyst Community Developments Society, had the unenviable task of taking the reins in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Harrison leads a team of 15 at the Vancouver-based not-for-profit real estate developer, which works with other nonprofits, community groups and municipal governments to build affordable, mixed-income rental housing.
Since it launched in 2013, Catalyst has built or operated 341 homes across seven projects. Under development: another 1,000-plus homes in 11 more projects. Catalyst recently welcomed tenants to its 119-unit Alder project in Vancouver’s River District. Two other developments totalling 200 units, in Vancouver and Port Moody, will open soon.
For Harrison, whose previous roles include director and CEO of the Vancouver Affordable Housing Agency and real estate development manager with TransLink, the pandemic has yielded some unexpected benefits.
Going remote was not a hugely difficult process for us because we were focusing on development and project management. We’re better being in a remote environment than we were when we worked in person.
What is hard is figuring out the informal collaboration on issues because we’re not all in the same space.
We do community development, and getting to know the people who live in the buildings is harder to do when you have to set up a time to be over Zoom. So that part’s been a little trickier to scale into a virtual world.
Some of the things we looked at early on were for new contractual relationships we have with suppliers that were typically managed through other parties that we employ directly. For example, if there’s an issue with an electrical contractor, do we have to negotiate a new relationship directly with that electrical contractor, in order to make sure they feel comfortable that they’re going to get paid and stay in this project? We had to go a few steps deeper into that supply chain to say, We’re still in business; we know that this project is going to be financed.
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Recognizing what we were going through as an organization, and having direct contact with my executive team and all the staff to not pretend that everything’s OK. Having very honest and transparent discussions with everyone about what they’re experiencing and how we can help and support them. I would say it’s a level of empathy and trust that you’re trying to establish and grow with the people who work with you.
It’s very easy to get overwhelmed. Prioritize your absolute most efficient time to do the tasks you have to do. I believe that people can do their best, most productive work in about two or three hours a day, and they’re not doing their best work outside of that. Know what you’re going to do the next day, the day ahead, at the end of the week. It’s simply prioritizing your time in front of you rather than reacting to what’s coming at you in that moment.
The most critical shortage in growing a business is people right now. And so for small organizations trying to scale and grow, our strategy can’t be that we’re just going to hire a bunch of people. We really must be critical with the calibre of individuals that we hire, because we’re just not going to get there by hiring lots of people and filling a lot of seats. And it’s not like we’re trying to create extremely unique, technical, differentiated positions that are filled by very specific people. They just need to be—I call them high-utility people, people that will find any way to get around a challenge, any way to get around an obstacle.