Bob Beitcher has led the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s Wasserman Campus in Woodland Hills for more than 10 years, and prior that was a major executive at multiple companies in the entertainment industry, including Panavision and Jim Henson Productions. He considers MPTF residents close friends, and has made it his mission to keep them as safe as possible, and their families well informed during the pandemic. Despite best efforts, eight residents and two staff members were lost to the virus.Question: How has MPTF fared financially during the pandemic?Answer: Operating revenues went down, that’s revenues from all of our services. Fundraising was in total relatively consistent with the year before. We had additional costs: 20,000 COVID tests on campus; a food program for our staff; and we set up an isolation unit for those who had COVID, which was very expensive. PPE was running $75,000 to $100,000 a month above what we’d normally pay. There were very specific pandemic costs that we had to offset through fundraising. For a long part of 2020, we weren’t accepting new residents.
How does that compare to other nonprofit retirement communities?Nonprofits aren’t set up to make money. In the best of both worlds, maybe you break even. We’re very blessed to have a healthy reserve. In years when our fundraising doesn’t make up for a gap in operating revenue and operating expenses, and fundraising, then we can offset it with our reserves. But obviously, you can’t do that forever or you’ll deplete your reserves. Some nonprofits reduce services, some were forced to reduce staffing levels.
Did you have to take any of those steps?We reduced one service – home safety sessions – but we didn’t reduce staffing levels. In fact, we actually increased it because we had an additional isolation unit to deal with. We got through it by tapping into our reserves. We provided meals for all of our employees during the pandemic – that was something expensive for us to do but we felt it was the right thing. It was a good way to reward them and keep them safe and out of grocery stores.What have you learned from the pandemic?Hopefully, one of the things (retirement facilities) learned was that honest communication is only going to be a good thing. My mother-in-law is in a retirement community in Florida and we did not get good information about her place. … And even though it was all going well and she didn’t feel much at risk, you just want to hear from someone. You want to hear someone’s voice, you want to hear what’s going on. Otherwise, you just think the worst.How did MPTF handle communication?Since April, I sent a weekly update to all the families that tells them everything they should know, lays it all out there. When we have people dying, I tell them people are dying. If staff tests positive, I say how many test positive, where they work. I’ve erred on the side of just being totally open with them, because I saw all these stories early on of, “I don’t know what’s happening in my mother’s nursing home, they won’t tell me anything.” “People are dying and I can’t get through, I know no one is telling me the truth,” those kinds of stories. We said, that’s not what we’re going to be.What’s the takeaway for you personally?I’ve had a pretty great career for 35 years, fortunate enough to lead some great companies and work with wonderful people. This will be the year and the experiences I’ll remember for the rest of my life. They’re the stories I’ll share when I’m in a retirement community or sitting with my grandchildren. It’s been an intense year.And your work at MPTF?People know that I have a very close relationship with my residents on campus and with my staff. We lost eight residents and that was incredibly painful to me, personally, and to all of us. We lost two staff members just recently and that was absolutely tragic. In the midst of all of that, what I got to see was how a group of people who are committed to a mission and are willing to be there for each other and support each other, lift each other up in tough times, how they can rise to incredible heights.Were residents who tested positive for COVID-19 cared for on campus?As soon as we had that first person, we had two choices. We were going to send our residents out to a local hospital, or we would have this wing of our hospital, that hadn’t been used in six or eight years, we could try to get that back up and running. Our feeling was, these are our residents and we want to keep them here and we want to provide them with the best care. We don’t know what’s going on in hospitals. Within a week, this wing that had been abandoned for all this time, a multi-disciplinary team descended on this place and a week later we were up and running with a COVID isolation unit. It’s like a military group standing up headquarters in a week’s time.
Who worked in the isolation unit?We realized we needed administrative support in addition to clinical support, and two staff members, one is our wellness director and one is our health insurance director, put up their hands and said, “Put me in, coach. I’m willing to do this.” There was no reason for them to volunteer and put themselves at risk in a unit where there are 10 to 12 people with COVID. But that’s what they wanted to do. Staff members have slept at hotels for six, seven weeks without seeing their families so they could do the work here and keep their families safe.
What happened with prospective residents?With this pandemic, everyone is saying, “Hey, I’m ready. When can I move in? I want to be in a place that’s safe where I’m not scrambling, not worried about getting food, I’ve got food insecurity, can’t find food, toilet paper, great nursing staff … I don’t want to rely on family members who don’t want to be near each other because of COVID.” This has become a safe haven for a lot of people. Every time we’ve gotten this little window, the positivity rate in cases goes down and we’re allowed to admit new residents, we are bringing in several people a week onto the campus.Is that the norm for retirement communities?This is an entirely different place. We’re on 20 acres, our residents talk about taking long walks in nature on campus. We’re different from a lot of other places and nursing homes where there are two or three people in a room and they have a high COVID rate and high death rate.How was fundraising affected?Relatively consistent with the year before. We had planned to launch fundraising for our 100th anniversary last year – that obviously didn’t happen. We received generous contributions to support us and the entertainment industry workforce during the pandemic. That wasn’t something we expected, but that was a plus.Did you receive government assistance?We received PPP during the pandemic but it’s still in the form of a loan and it has to be forgiven, so that is a big outstanding issue for us. If you were true to your original mandate, you kept people employed, you paid your rent, all of the things you were allowed to include in your original submission, then it can be forgiven. You have to submit a statement saying what you used it for, what your year looked like, and you get told, “yes, we’re forgiving 100 percent of it, none of it, part of it.” We’re still working on our submission, so we don’t know the answer at this point. We probably won’t know for another five, six months.
COVID Caregiver
