After working with Indigenous Services Canada, as a volunteer firefighter in the Manitoba area, and a board member with DRI Canada, it’s not surprising that Brock Holowachuk, CBCP, would pass on a lot of resilience knowledge to his daughter Katelyn, winner of the DRI Foundation Award for college undergraduates.
Her father’s emergency management experience led Katelyn to becoming trained herself. “I took a course with my dad, where if there were an emergency here in Springfield, the steps we could take to help the community safely evacuate,” she said. “We went to the local high school and did a roleplay scenario, and that really helped open it up and show what it would really be like.”
The school’s drama club aided the simulation, receiving prompts to perform as different members of the community in need of assistance, to give Katelyn and the other trainees the chance to come up with solutions in real time.
But it was a real-life emergency that led to her more fully grasping Brock’s career challenges: the COVID-19 pandemic. “Since I was doing school remotely and he was working at home during COVID, I remember I could hear all the things that he was working on, and what I really noticed was that getting through an emergency really depends on creative problem solving,” she said. “I thought about that when I was writing my essay. As I was researching supply chain disruptions, which are very hard to predict, I saw how in a situation like COVID the solutions would come from creative thinking.”
She expounds further in her essay:
My approach to helping organizations respond to an era of supply chain uncertainty would be to encourage a re-framing of the role of continuity manager toward the goal of building continuity management into the culture of the organization, with emphasis on engaging employees to encourage a deeper sense of creativity in order to hedge against narrow thinking that could result in ‘failure of the imagination’.
Her COVID experience in school also led her to her current pursuit of an Education degree at Université de St-Boniface. “I started thinking seriously about going into teaching during COVID because I saw how much teachers were helping their students get through a difficult time in their lives and using a lot of the principles of continuity management,” she said. “They adapted their teaching to use online tools and found different types of ways to connect with students coming up with creative solutions that helped their students. When I’m working as a teacher, I hope I can do the same.”
“I’ll be grateful to Alan Berman for a very long time for having called me first so that I could share the news,” Brock says about learning Katelyn had won the scholarship. “It was an exciting day because I know Kate did the work; she put a lot of time and thought and research into the essay. To be able to share that good news myself meant a great deal.”
Before she heads back to school, Katelyn will be on a tour of Atlantic Canada, where she will compete with the Selo Ukrainian Dancers of Anola, Manitoba. “Our ensemble has performed and received awards at major events and competitions including the Canadian National Ukrainian Festival, and we regularly participate in cultural activities involving the Ukrainian community in Manitoba,” she said.
We wish her the best of luck in the competition and her studies. Click here to read her winning essay.