Our principles to action on hope
This is part of a series in Mutual Aid as Startup.
It has been a crazy week. We are now getting 30+ requests a day, and we are rolling out our set up to more neighbourhoods. (It’s robust enough for the challenge!)
All of a sudden, we have a core group of people organising, triaging, and sending out volunteers. We have a verification process. We have regular rhythms. Over the weekend we set up a delivery fleet of drivers for the food bank, to help with the increased demand. We keep asking each other “Are we a scale-up now?” as we cope with the growing workload.
As the demand goes up, we are seeing more edge cases. It’s no longer a simple “Can you do a weekly shop for me because I am self-isolating?” We are now seeing those who fall through the cracks — the ones who struggled before, now, even more so — and those who need a bit more mental attention.
We have had to reflect on what it is that we do, how do we do it, and most importantly, why do we do it.
What are the principles of our Mutual Aid?
We focus on the human touch
We have specifically kept some processes as a human processes. We dispatch volunteers based not only on location / availability, we look for a personality and expertise match. When our volunteers register, we ask them what they think their superpower is, in order to match them to the right requester.
We treat care as an emotion
Some of the help requesters (more often than you might imagine) feel ashamed or bad for asking for help. Some insist on maintain a level of personal independence. So, even when we simply refer a help requester to an alternative local grocery service, we still assign a volunteer to follow-up on the requester.
We are here for the psychological reassurance
Many of our requesters come to us with “I just want to register myself with you, in case I need something down the line.” The people we have helped, some in tears, tell us about how grateful they are to know that they have community care to fall back on. We are in a crisis. It’s a reassuring to know that your community is there for you.
We measure ourselves on our effectiveness to deliver care
We are not a charity and we are not the government. We organise ourselves in a flat structure. We pride ourselves in solving difficult problems in order to deliver care. When we encounter a very vulnerable case that we cannot support (for example, someone who is homeless or in poverty), we want to make sure that we can refer them to the right hands.
We are here to action on hope
This is a time of hyper-tension. We are fearless in the face uncertainties, while marching forward with calculated optimism. The most important thing that we bring is that act in line with the hope that can carry us to the calmer future.
Applying our principles to our services
We have started to think about the core of our service based on the requests that we are getting. Before considering writing long guidelines, we are mentally structuring a model for our services. We will continuous evolve our services based on the needs of the people.
We want to empower our teams to triage effectively and make good decisions. There’s always a certain risk that we take on, but if the benefit out-weights the risk, it’s something we will take on.
We came up with these principles and mental models on the fly this week because we had so many conversations around the requests. We are also very grateful that our set up and engaged community and volunteers are running so smoothly, as this gives us time to share with one another about the difficulties that we face.
At a time of crisis, we have had to think deeply (and very quickly!) about the value we bring to the world, and the hope that we want to see. This is the beginning of our foundation; to keep caring for the ones in need, in this time of darkness. Thinking like a startup — we are sure these will evolve as we go on.
