Lai, Cota and VanDiver serve on the board of directors for the San Diego Convention Center. Lai lives in Carmel Valley, Cota lives in Bay Park and VanDiver lives in Clairemont.
Imagine building a micro-city every few days, just to tear it down to nothing and do it again, over and over, year-round. The halls of the San Diego Convention Center are home to countless events, from our local San Diego Auto Show to myriad medical conventions and the iconic Comic-Con International: San Diego.
We pride ourselves on the industry-leading service our staff and partners provide to each and every client, and for years, we have enjoyed a booking schedule that reflects happy customers. That all threatened to change in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic changed the world. Our convention center team faced layoffs, an empty building and an uncertain future.
As the pandemic decimated the large events industry, it simultaneously provided us with a unique opportunity to serve our local community. Officials at the city of San Diego, the county of San Diego and the San Diego Housing Commission asked if we might pivot from our mandate to drive economic impact to a new mission: humanitarian service protecting the most vulnerable in our region.
First, through Operation Shelter to Home, we worked with regional partners to open our doors to provide safe and secure shelter to thousands of our unsheltered neighbors, resulting in our partners at Centerplate serving more than 1 million meals and the permanent or long-term housing of nearly 1,300 San Diegans.
After closing the Operation Shelter to Home site after almost a year of operation, our regional elected leadership worked with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to turn our convention center into the nation’s model emergency intake site to safely shelter and reunite unaccompanied children seeking asylum at our border.
As board , we had an opportunity to see this effort from a unique perspective and at all points in the process. We were honored to mobilize our facility and staff to meet this urgent need. We are so proud of everything our teams have accomplished together under the shared banner of the values our country holds dear.
The phone room — the place where for 12 hours a day volunteers from all parts of our country worked with our young guests to get in touch with their families here in the United States and back home — was particularly impactful for each of us and seemingly everyone who visited or ed the operation. In the room, nearly every inch of wall space displayed art from our guests. Hand-drawn art proclaiming “I love San Diego” and “San Diego is awesome” lined the walls. We saw maps of where the kids’ U.S.-based families were and where they started their journeys. In another location, we saw the map of where our guests landed after being reunified with family here in 45 of our United States.
It’s unquestionably true that the need to shelter them, away from their family and loved ones, within our convention center is a tragedy unto itself. While we are certainly elated that so many people, organizations and government bodies stepped up to help ease the pain and reunify, this was a short-term solution for a longer term issue.
And it’s quite true that San Diego stood out among other regions hosting these emergency intake shelters. Our entire region showed up to serve our most vulnerable visitors. Local, regional, state and federal government leaders visited the site, asked what they could do to help and collaborated in extraordinary ways. Staff and volunteers from nonprofit organizations across the region showed up in droves and worked long, arduous hours to make sure we were able to reunite families. They helped the boys and girls call their families, taught classes, brought in diverse entertainment, advised the children of their legal rights, provided medical and dental care, and ensured that each and every child who came through our doors felt safe, secure and loved. Donations came in from all over the county.
Many dire circumstances and negative outcomes resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s going to take our world years to recover, but the bright spots are worth celebrating. We are so proud of our city, our neighbors and the role our convention center team played in this effort. We showed the world what San Diegans value and demonstrated that we are a welcoming city unwilling to play politics when it comes to the safety and well-being of children, no matter the country from which they’ve traveled. We showed that our community is willing to step up and meet the moment when it counts.
To the children we served: we see you, we appreciate you, and we thank you for everything you taught our teams and us along the way. You brought laughter and light to our halls. You’ll always have a friend in the San Diego Convention Center, and we hope to see you thriving across this country.
