The contractions started shortly after midnight.  

“Is this happening?” 

This wasn’t the plan. Two weeks earlier, we had scheduled a C section to deliver our breech baby on Monday morning – still eight hours away. We drove to the hospital and found ourselves in a small room, my wife in bed with straps around her belly, nurses dutifully monitoring her health and the baby’s.  

I joined Allison+Partners in February 2020. Having worked in agencies for my entire career, I knew early mornings, late nights and frequent travel were the price of admission. Before the pandemic, I had a regular routine down: Out of the house early before my daughter woke up, back home after she went to bed, and weekends as a sort of catch up before Monday came for us to do it all over again.

Juneteenth, or “Black Independence Day,” commemorates the freedom of enslaved Americans in the United States and is identified as the first Black American holiday. Short for “June Nineteenth,” the holiday marks the day when federal troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, in 1865 to inform enslaved people they were freed. 

Since the late 1800s, many Black Americans have honored Juneteenth as the commemoration of the struggle of enslaved persons and communal celebration of Black liberation. However, its history is multifaceted and brings about a multitude of feelings and perspectives from across the Black diaspora. As communicators, we must be familiar with this history and the feelings this commemoration evokes, if we are to counsel clients effectively.

In early June 2015, I sat across from Tara Chiarell, now general manager of the Washington, D.C. office and executive director of client experience, to interview for an assistant account executive position at Allison+Partners. A picture book of her safari sabbatical sat on her desk as she told me about the month-long sabbatical perk that Allison+Partners employees qualify for after five years of employment.

“How cool… isn’t that just for professors?” I thought to myself. “Sounds like an adult study abroad.”

The tears welling up in my eyes multiple times during the day only modestly hint at what I’ve felt inside over the past two days. Yesterday, the tears appeared when I dropped my kids off at school in the morning, again with every news story about grieving Texas parents throughout the day, and – not for the last time – when I was lucky enough to be able to hug my kids again after school. As one of the leaders of Allison+Partners’ employee advocacy group Allison+Family, those tears are blurring my vision now as I’m typing and will probably punctuate my day between meetings and projects. 

Alumni Scott Allison and Scott Pansky embody the phrase “Aztec for Life.” The two, who graduated in 1986 and 1991 respectively, have shared many titles: students, alumni, colleagues and co-founders. But the most important title shared between the two is friends; a friendship that transcends decades of expansion and innovation in the field of public relations. With no intention of slowing down, their growth has brought them full-circle to where it all began, allowing them to give to current students the necessary tools that once helped them launch their careers.

The distinct smell of recession is in the air. With a falloff in economic growth, decreasing profitability, continuing supply chain challenges and a myriad of other negative factors impacting business, CMOs have been handed budget cuts with an ask to make the marketing dollar go farther.