Covid-19 – Establish Local Community Support Groups – Here’s How
These are extraordinary times and our communities are doing remarkable things to help and support each other. In Burgess Hill a Facebook group (Burgess Hill Helper Army) was set up with the aim of getting food and meds to the vulnerable and people self-isolating. Within 7 days the membership went from 0 to 400, its now 1400 volunteers; those with DBS answer the phone lines, deliver food, run the Befriender phone lines and run online live sessions.
More remarkably within 8 days all the processes and policy documents were created and the group was GDPR compliant and with safeguarding in place. The Council provided support and advice and the level of engagement from them has been fantastic, with both funding and support in so many areas.
It’s been uplifting to witness a community come together, there are so many inspirational examples of companies orgs and individuals responding, be it donations of food and industrial freezers to store donated food for the food banks, to a small army of people hand stitching masks within hours of a request from the Brow Medical centre. Within days the group was running live yoga and mindfulness classes, activities for kids and virtual coffee mornings. They have sourced and delivered food to struggling care homes and hospices delivered food boxes to the vulnerable, put 300 posters around the town, and signpost callers to other services and agencies who can provide other support.
There are now hundreds of Covid-19 groups around the country so if members with their amazing range of skills wanted to do something for their local community there is a way to get up and running fast. The Burgess Hill Helper Army is the perfect template for setting up a group of your own, on their team are people with national high level experience who have put together all the process and procedure documentation and the protocols for being GDPR compliant which can be shared so all the heavy lifting is done. They will also be able to share experience of running a group, working with your local Council, mainstream Charities to align with and how they have utilised local resources. One organisation stepped up and is paying for the fuel costs for the delivery teams, another has donated 1000 pairs of surgical gloves following a request from local funeral directors.
In these challenging times my personal message to members is please either connect with your local group or consider creating one, if staff are furloughed there are many ways they can contribute, it may just be storage space, a delivery vehicle to collect bulk items, sourcing something the community needs and thinking laterally about what your company and network can do.
Facebook seems to be the channel of choice for most groups, please have a look at https://www.facebook.com/groups/BHillhelpers/ to get a sense of what they are doing. They have become the delivery arm for a huge amount the local council needs to action as part of the government’s response to the lock down. Let’s work together on this.