The View from Quarantine: How to Help Your Community

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People-Centered Internet

3 min readMar 15, 2020

We’re likely to have a lot of people inside soon. This is likely to change how we from and act as local and wider communities for a while: here are some of my notes on that.

Helping your community

Thoughts about community. Because a) we’re all about to get a lot more local, and b) community is how we get through the next few weeks/months.

Neighbours. I’m an early adopter. If we all get stuck inside, am seriously considering starting a local group (if there isn’t one already) and sticking big notes with its address on in my windows, and a note for my neighbours to do the same for their neighbours…
Local businesses. How can we techs start supporting the businesses that are going to get hit. Like my local gym. They’re a lovely bunch. I’m not going to cancel my subscription. That’s one small thing. But could we help them create virtual classes and support groups that people with subscriptions could “turn up” to?
Local restaurants and cafes. What alternative ways of providing and delivering food could there be, in a variety of situations? In a total lockdown could they do cooking classes? In a semi-quarantine, how can we neighbours help with deliveries etc?
It’s all rings. Ourselves (because if you’re down you can’t help others), family, friends and neighbours, local community, wider community etc. That said — who did I miss? What could we start to do?

Older neighbours

Right now, a bunch of old people in your area are probably terrified. Covid19 precautions are happening, and they know their age groups are disproportionately hit. They’re also an age group who often don’t have the funds to just go buy weeks of groceries in one hit. I’m starting to hear reports of people scared to go shopping etc. And I’ve spent the past week helping friends get supplies remotely to their older parents. So… Things you can do.

Check on your own old folks. Most big supermarkets have deliveries that you can pay for and have sent to their house (but for the love of god check with your mother first before you send her a bunch of hipster food she won’t eat, and gets so offended she won’t talk to you for months).
Make sure people know that they don’t have to go *in* the store. There’s online delivery, but many stores also have
pickup services (e.g. https://www.fredmeyer.com/topic/clicklist) where you order groceries online, then drive to the store and the store will put your groceries in your car trunk/boot for you.
That goes double for medications. Most of the big pharmacies (CVS etc) have been delivering to homes recently too.
If you’re out and about, or online with them, say hi to your older neighbours (from a safe distance of course). Ask them if they need anything picking up when you go shopping.
If you have senior groups near you, maybe call and ask if there are ways like this you can help?
If you think you can get away with it socially, maybe accidentally buy too many groceries and give them to neighbours who need them? I’ve been pulling the “let’s cook at your house instead of going out to dinner” trick on people, to leave supplies with people who needed them for years (sorry chaps), and although we probably can’t do that, maybe get creative around “whoops they had a 2 for 1 deal”?
I haven’t been outside for nearly two weeks, so can someone please confirm whether there are drop-off bins in the supermarkets yet? If there are, please use them if you’re in a position to. We all need to get through this together, and not everybody here is going to have resources to draw on.

Culture

Culture brings people together. I’m not sure how games are going to work, but here are some of the other things going from the physical to the online.

Opera: