This can get very confusing!
Hopefully this will help. It’s early days and we’re all trying to understand how we will all work together.
The new organisation, 3SG, set up to coordinate Bath’s response to Coronavirus has started up an operation called ‘Compassionate Community Connection’ to bring offers of help to those who ask for it.
As Camden already has one of these run by this association, Camden residents are asked to rely upon us to link ‘requesters’ to ‘volunteers’. We’re one of just four communities doing this at the moment.
3SG are issuing some good stuff each day in the form of a newsletter most days. We’re still working out how to get that to you in a readable form to you.
Finally we’ve tried to make requesting and volunteering a bit easier on our web-site. There’s a massive red button to click on the Coronavirus page, and a link to it on every page of the web-site in the top right hand corner.
In fact you can even click on this picture to get started. If you are worried about someone else you can register that concern too.
Very last of all, we’re not an emergency service working 24×7. We are volunteers aiming to put together folk who can help one another for the duration of the epidemic. If you have very urgent needs you will still need to dial 999.
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That’s helpful, thanks. We should also add that as volunteers have to ration their own shopping for essentials then they will need to add the requester’s list to their own, rather than make a separate trip.
Yes – we do need define the protocols carefully, as you suggest. There are several flavours of shopping trip, for example:
1. Being given a shopping list somehow, and doing the shopping, and knowing how to substitute for stuff they don’t have – allergies etc. I’ve had to do that already – took ages reading the ingredients lists on things and making judgements
2. Adding to an existing on-line shopping order
3. Collecting something ordered using ‘click and collect’, or deposited in an Amazon locker, for example
4. Someone insisting you continue searching till you find what they want – yes possible!