Community Organising

[picklemewalnuts]

I've been thinking about what volunteer networks could do, should it become necessary. Many people won't need support, but others will be anxious and or socially isolated already.

Any ideas?
I wondered about a telephone check in service, ringing regularly to see whether older folk are doing ok.

Or perhaps a number people could ring if they needed something, and some volunteers lined up to help.

People could run out of an essential and be unable to get out for it, for example. Baby milk, medicines.

I'm heading off to work, but will check in later.

Are you thinking about existing community organisations? Or urging a new coming together to help?

Things like churches, over 60s lunch clubs, WVS, council health/wellbeing/public health departments, hospital friends associations, the Good Gym, RBL, and loads of others that aren't springing to mins as readily, may well be thinking about what can be done. Co-ordinating to multiply effort (rather than duplicate)could be a useful role

Good idea for a thread. I was also thinking about this recently. We live in a cul de sac and have a 'street WhatsApp group' for most of us, but of course the 2 or 3 older residents aren't on it.

Most of us have weekly grocery deliveries - we should be popping in to elderly relatives and asking if they want anything added.
My neighbour's husband is in a care home which I suspect will soon be shut to residents. I wondered about helping her to still talk to her husband by arranging with them to use Facetime/ Skype etc?

If the schools shut then I guess I could offer to look after children to allow others to go to work (especially in essential services).

That's the kind of thing.

Coordinating instead of duplicating existing groups I hadn't thought of.

We have a very location specific community FB Page, but need to catch up the older residents.

People may be away unexpectedly and need pets feeding.

How do we coordinate things though, any ideas? Maybe a phone number/email contact collecting requests on a shared document, and a team of people using the doc to allocate volunteers?

Skype conversation is a great idea, too!

If you have reasonably tech-savvy people, something like zoom.us/ is great for face to face meetings/ discussions

One good thing wouid be to see (if schools close completely) there are older teens who would be happy to do daytime babysitting.

This could be taking sole charge of older DC - who get someone like a big brother/sister to hang out with. Or just being first line of company for little ones, whose work from home parents would actually like to get some work done, but are essentially within earshot of things go pearshaped.

Nice idea!