Dear National Liaison Officials!

I hope this message finds you all well! 

While we are starting into the fourth week of teleworking, we would like to share some information and express our solidarity with all of you who are currently involved in dealing with the Covid-19 crisis and its consequences. We continue our research activities and staff are really marvelous in dealing with this situation. However, as all other institutions we are of course restricted in all activities that imply direct personal contact such as project meetings, peer reviews, workshops or conferences. We still hope that some of these events can be postponed to a later date, but many of them will remain cancelled. 

Of course, this will also impact on the European Centre's economic performance and we keep the financial consequences of related losses under scrutiny. However, compared to many other branches we are still privileged and have used this period even to acquire new projects and to start new initiatives such es the tailor-made European Centre Social Policy Trainings, a new feature on “Research in the time of Covid-19” on our website  and contributions to the newly established website by the International Long-Term Care Policy Network (ILPN) about LTC policy responses to Covid-19. You might have seen these news in our Newsletter that was published on Thursday evening - unfortunately we then had a hard disk-breakdown on our main server on Friday, but it is online again now … Please click here for the refreshed Newsletter - the links should be in order again!

We are also improving daily in our home office resilience and in our ability to use teleconferencing tools, but this crisis will certainly change our ways of working and living in the future. We shall gauge the new opportunities that these new experiences might entail - and even if there are partly adverse signs (EU role, Eurobonds debate …) we are optimistic that new and improved international cooperation in social welfare policies will be one of the opportunities we have to carry forward. We are here to work with you, so please do not hesitate to share your ideas, requests and criticisms!

Keep in touch (virtually, for the time being!) and stay healthy!

Kai 

(on behalf of the European Centre team)