As we all experience the uncertainty and trials of this outbreak together, we are also seeing an increase in ways to help! We love seeing how people come together to serve one another during difficult times. 

There are so many great ways to support your neighbors, in fact, our first blog post couldn’t hold them all! Here is our second list of recommendations for how you can support your community during this crisis.

Help food insecure children

A lot of families rely on low-cost or free school lunches to help lift the burden of expensive food costs. With schools now shut down, low-income families are in need of solutions to help provide for their children, here's how you can assist.

“Adopt” a grandparent!

This nursing home has gotten creative in response to having to severely limit the residents’ ability to interact with others. As you can imagine, it gets lonely in isolation, and you can use some of your spare time to help! The “Adopt a Grandparent” campaign connects individuals with an elder to have online interactions. Here's how to get started!

Reduce the PPE shortage

We are seeing a significant shortage in personal protective equipment around the world during this crisis, and you can assist in supplying these to family, friends and your community! 100 Million Masks has some helpful tips and guidelines for anyone interested in sewing their own masks. Get involved here.

Join or start a mutual aid network 

Mutual aid networks are a great way to connect to your immediate community to provide support. It can be as simple as a Whatsapp group for your neighborhood where people check-in, share local resources and also can look after at-risk or elderly neighbors, or you can expand it to your town! It can be as small of a network or as large as one as you want! Here are some examples to reference with a really cool google docs list of resources to share by state. 

Volunteer from home

You can make a difference from your couch! There are tons of ways to support others virtually, whether it’s directly related to the crisis or to maintaining existing nonprofits or community services that need even more support than usual. We rounded up some opportunities we found to virtually volunteer here. 

Support farmers

 
Many farmers could be at risk of losing their income due to people reducing purchases of perishable items. We owe so much thanks to the people who grow our food and keep us healthy and satiated, this is a great time to support our local growers. We recently found a resource from an amazing woman who created this database of how to eat locally grown produce. All options are either available for home delivery, contactless pickup or offer nationwide shipment. Check out the list here.

Stay home

We know we’re preaching to the choir but the most helpful thing anyone can do is to stay home during this crazy time. If you are getting a little stir crazy indoors we also have a blog post to help with that (as you can probably tell, we’ve had a lot of time to write lately.)