For Atlantic Union Bank General Counsel Rachael Lape, tending to the green inside her home became a grounding task during the pandemic, especially in the early days when COVID-19 tested how agile she and her colleagues could be with enacting the Paycheck Protection Program.
Lape is a self-described houseplant fanatic, often with more than 30 plants scattered throughout her house. During the pandemic, she spent extra time tending to their needs: repotting them, making sure the soil was fresh and fertilized, trimming their dead leaves, watering them just right. “It is almost meditative,” she says. “I do not think I would have weathered the pandemic quite as well without my plants.”
Lape takes the same care with her work. She is gratified by how she and her banking teammates were able to help so many small businesses during the crisis. "With very little information on how to operationalize the [Paycheck Protection] program, AUB figured it out on the fly, and my team was part of that figuring it out.”
In addition, Lape is proud of the meetings she had with her team, making sure that she talked more openly about her mental health and encouraged others to discuss the stress that they were feeling. “We are under a lot of pressure to be perfect, not to show any cracks,” Lape says. “But everyone was flipped upside down [in spring 2020].”
She looks forward to seeing her colleagues in person, at the office, after Labor Day. “I feel that we need that as a society, we need that connective tissue.”
