Invisible Hands: A Rapid Application Development Case Study — Part 1
This is the first of a three-part series that examines the pandemic response that became Invisible Hands; Commander, the custom-coded CRM and order management tool built for the organization; and an exploration of the issues that existed well before the pandemic and communities that have been working to address them for decades
Almost a year on, it’s difficult to imagine that anyone in the US has forgotten the events of March 11, 2020. On that day, the WHO declared Covid-19 a global pandemic, the NBA suspended its season, and Tom Hanks announced he had tested positive and was recovering in Australia. All the signs had been coming for months, since the first cluster of cases were reported on December 31, 2019. As countries all over the world reported cases and waves of travel bans and lockdowns were instated, Americans largely continued their lives as normal, albeit with a growing sense of unease. But the events that coalesced on March 11 seemed to snap Americans into a stark new reality, as lockdowns became desperate, inevitable measures taken by cities and states to slow the spread of the virus.
With a deepening understanding of how dangerous the pandemic would be, Simone Policano walked past a grocery store on March 12 and mentally noted that the elderly New Yorkers purchasing groceries inside were especially vulnerable. She wondered, first to herself and later on social media, if there was an organization coordinating volunteer grocery and food delivery to the elderly and immunocompromised, hoping she could help. Most of the feedback she received on the post seemed to indicate that no one knew of an organization with such a mission (to be clear, mutual aid organizations have been doing similar work for a long time, and we’ll explore this in depth in Part 3), but many expressed that they would be interested in volunteering in a similar capacity. Simone created a Google Doc to capture interest.
Liam Elkind, college student and brother of one of Simone’s childhood friends, saw the post and reached out to set up a call. This type of organization didn’t seem to exist, so what if they created one themselves? The next day, Healy Chait also joined as a co-founder and by March 14, a Squarespace website was up and running and Invisible Hands was born. In a prescient early moment, the founders decided to spring for the Squarespace plan that included the ability to accept donations. The organization made its first delivery on March 15.
I signed up on March 16, through a Google Sheet posted by one of my friends on Facebook. During that first official week of New York City’s pandemic lockdown in March, it was starting to sink in for me that this would be a defining event of t̵h̵e̵ ̵y̵e̵a̵r̵ a generation. I was itching to do something, anything helpful. This seemed like the answer.
The day I signed up, the “system” was a group text to 14 people asking if anyone could do a delivery that happened to be close by.
I was out for a run when these texts came in and the supremely capable Laura Moss beat me to the punch, completing the delivery the following day. As helpful as that was, they recognized that the founders needed more than on-the-ground help. They needed help jumpstarting the organization’s infrastructure. It was the beginning of their pivotal involvement with the organization.
Meanwhile, Invisible Hands had gone viral through the social media post, Google Sheet signup, and website. The founders’ first media appearance was NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, which aired on March 18. They continued to do media appearances throughout the weekend, with outlets including Good Morning America, New York Times, 1010Wins, Fox and Friends, and the BBC. Each one brought a new wave of interest from people wanting to volunteer, people in need of the service, and those who were simply interested in helping out. As some happy mix of offhand comment and kind gesture, a producer on Lester Holt put them in touch with a marketing and communications expert and recommended they put all their social media accounts on dual authentication protocols.
In addition to the media appearances, Liam and Simone’s personal phone numbers were bombarded with requests from both press and recipients in need of groceries. They were included on several large social media accounts, including Blake Lively’s instagram story and on Elle.com. Liam’s number was sent in an email to constituents from Bernie Sanders. Once Invisible Hands began to make flyers, they realized they would need a centralized phone line and even more questions arose. What would happen if the line was busy? Would they need to port it somewhere?
It was clear the growth trajectory of Invisible Hands was outpacing the development of its infrastructure. The group text and Google Sheet quickly evolved into a Slack group with an increasingly sophisticated set of channels broken up by neighborhoods in New York and New Jersey. Everything about the organization evolved quickly because it had to. The pandemic forced everyone’s hand. At its (erstwhile) peak in early April, NYC reported over 5000 Covid-19 cases in one day, with its early mortality rate climbing just above 10%.
Pre and post pandemic, Laura is a filmmaker. Simone put them in contact with Julia Kennelly and Karine Benzaria, whom Simone had worked with on film projects in the past. Laura’s creative partner reached out to their union, the Local 52 Motion Picture Studio Mechanics, and got a response from Monica Jacobs. Laura assembled this team of film professionals, who would eventually come to run the Call Center, Captain Delivery, and the Partnerships teams. They were affectionately known as “JKLM” during operations rundowns, and whether due to the dynamics of the film industry or simply good chemistry, they gelled remarkably well as a team.
After that first delivery, Laura approached Simone to ask if they could help with operations by taking one thing off Simone’s plate, so Simone introduced them to the Call Center. Or at least, the beginnings of the Call Center, which at that point included a Google Voice number and a Google Doc (not to worry, Excel lovers, it was immediately converted into a spreadsheet). At that point, the glue holding the Call Center and Captain Delivery together was a mess of Google Sheets and Google Voice, which were the most easily accessible (and affordable) tools they had. Soon, Laura, Julia, Karine, and Monica were working Call Center shifts almost around the clock. Even once they’d established official Call Center hours and recruited volunteers to help in shifts (this is when I started volunteering at the Call Center), it was obvious that both Call Center and Captain Delivery would need to shift dramatically to continue to meet the needs of recipients.
Several developers reached out to Laura, offering their skills up for the organization’s use. One of the first of these emails came from Matt Schaff. Matt has a BA in economics and a BS/MS in neuroscience, and somewhere along the way taught himself to code. The résumé Matt sent to Laura described his experience building sites in PHP and Drupal, and he proposed a meeting to discuss the organization’s needs and how he might be able to help. Matt himself had made several similar offers to area mutual aid organizations, but Laura was the first to respond to him on behalf of Invisible Hands.
The first meeting with Matt took place on March 23 and he came prepared with a full slide deck. Attendees included the founding team, Laura, Julia, and Karine, and the focus was communicating to Matt the needs of the fast-growing organization and its Call Center and Captain Delivery functions in order to understand what kind of tech solutions might improve their increasingly cumbersome operations. Matt’s first suggestion was to replace Google Voice with a more enterprise-focused and secure tool like MightyCall or Twilio’s Voice API. He and Laura also walked through the maze of spreadsheets that, by then, already encompassed hundreds of delivery orders and way too much personal data (addresses, phone numbers, etc).
To the whole team’s credit, Matt felt that the spreadsheets, even if a less than ideal solution, at the very least modeled out the system’s back end. He got right to work, making the first commit in GitHub on March 24. The brainchild of everyone’s work and all these conversations was called Commander, and it made its Call Center debut on a shift four (yes, four) days later on March 28.
Next week, in Part 2 of this series, Matt graciously answers some of my questions about Commander with regard to its inception and creation. He includes lots of detail about Commander’s stack and reasoning behind many of the technical decisions that were made. He also provides some perspective on the speed at which everything came together and many of the accompanying challenges. Finally, he discusses several projects that have come after Commander, including Invisible Hands’ Ballot Initiative, Drive Your Ballot, and the Invisible Hands app, the development of all of which he spearheaded.
In many ways, the stars aligned in a way that enabled Invisible Hands to be effective quickly, and eventually, sustainably. The founders knew enough to understand that the city was in dire need of something, but not so much that they were afraid of diving into what was actually an ocean of new and existing problems. A team of highly competent people assembled and were able to roll with the punches and make strategic decisions that would set the organization up with sound operating procedures for a year and beyond.
But what about the government’s response? What was being done at the federal, state, and municipal level to respond not just to the pandemic itself, but also the cascade of issues it exacerbated? Plenty has been written about various aspects of the federal government’s response, which was largely lacking and has contributed to the highest death toll of any country at 525,031 fatalities as of March 8, 2021.
In terms of issues like food insecurity, the US has also struggled to meet demand. A picture of lines at the San Antonio (my hometown) Food Bank went viral in April 2020, highlighting the struggle of tens of thousands of food insecure Texans.
New York City has often seemed a step behind food insecurity for its own citizens, particularly communities of color which have been the hardest hit by the pandemic. The Grab N Go program that allowed all New Yorkers to pick up free meals from public schools did not begin until April 3, and still did not address the needs of elderly, homebound, and otherwise immunocompromised New Yorkers. In mid-April, the city put forth a $170 million plan to combat food insecurity in the city, which included the expanded Grab N Go program, improving the food supply chain, and better supporting food pantries and soup kitchens around the city. The city does now have a mechanism in place for emergency food delivery, but its early rollout was mired in concerns about food quality and poor management.
A strong network of mutual aid organizations serving neighborhoods around New York City has filled many of these gaps not just during the pandemic, but well before. These will be the focus of Part 3.
In the interest of full disclosure, the author started their involvement with Invisible Hands as a delivery and Call Center volunteer, but has been a paid member of staff since September, managing the Call Center on Saturdays.
