Show HN: Find ways to help your community as we grapple with Covid-19 | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Find ways to help your community as we grapple with Covid-19

pandemicsupport.info

33 pointsgabem114 comments

As our communities grapple with the impacts of COVID-19, various organizations have sprung up to provide assistance. I wanted to gather together a quick list of local organizations that need help so that those of us that are looking to provide support can do so easily. Additionally, I was struggling to find ways to support local businesses -- donation links, gift card purchase links etc.

All of the information is sorted by proximity to you. Currently it’s mostly focused on the Boston area (since that’s where I am). However, the tool will work anywhere, I would just need a list of local organizations in that area.

After I created this I also found: https://giveandgetlocal.com/ and https://www.helpmainstreet.com/, which serve very similar needs.

I would very much appreciate: 1. Feedback on the tool 2. Suggestions about how I might source the data for other areas outside of Boston without violating terms and conditions 3. Names of relief funds or other ways people can support relief efforts

Also, I was looking at the helpmainstreet.com website that you mentioned in your comment and noticed they had a lot of businesses all around the country with links to gift cards. It's taken a fair amount of time for us to curate the gift card links for all the businesses on savemifaves.org, so I couldn't fathom how they could curate that many.

Looking through the links, it looks like almost all of them are links to squareup.com, toasttab.com, or quickgifts.com. I don't know about squareup.com or quickgifts.com, but when we were verifying the gift card links people were submitting (to ensure that people aren't setting up their own fraudulent gift card links for local businesses that don't already have their own way to purchase gift cards), we specifically looked at toasttab.com and realized that toasttab gift cards aren't all set up by the businesses themselves. Toasttab seems to set up their own gift card purchasing for local businesses, probably in order to reach out to the businesses and force them to sign up to claim their money from anyone who unwittingly purchases gift cards from there thinking the business must already be signed up.

So, we've had to spend a fair amount of time verifying submitted toasttab links to make sure the businesses actually signed up to sell gift cards through them, and that they weren't automatically set up without their knowledge. Otherwise, it's not going to help out that business much.

Looking at the helpmainstreet.com site, I'm a little disappointed, since I'm guessing the vast majority of businesses on there won't immediately and directly benefit from the purchase of gift cards as listed there. It's one thing to set up such a site as some sort of enterprise, but it seems disingenuous to use COVID-19 and claim that it's directly helping the businesses if it's not.

Wow, thanks for that info. I didn't realize toasttab had that issue. I will keep an eye out as people submit businesses via my form.

Also, great work building your database -- very impressive!

Additionally, almost none of the nearly 400 businesses that have been submitted or added to our site for Michigan have used squareup or quickgifts for selling gift cards, so I have the same suspicion about the preponderance of those links as well.

Very nice. We've built a similar tool, mainly geared toward purchasing gift cards, for Michigan. The code was built to make it as easy as possible to manage and add new businesses, so that others can easily deploy it for their own states.

https://www.savemifaves.org/

This is really cool, and something I had not thought of. I don't eat out enough to support my local restaurants during the crisis, but purchasing their gift cards would allow me to enjoy them even afterwards while supporting them during.

Another suggestion: you are asking for data to source.

To help others, also make all the data you have available as Open Data. A good API or data dump (both ideally) and an open license.

Done - you can find the database here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tL6PqwVhj0Aa3COGlmok...

Great idea. I'll look into this.

If you're in the UK there are lots of Mutual Aid societies that have set up to help neighbours who are self isolating. You can see the directory here - https://covidmutualaid.org/

I'm in one of these in Shacklewell and it's great to see people helping each other on small scale with shopping, prescriptions and friendly phone calls and chats.

It's interesting that most of them are using WhatsApp or Facebook groups. They're not really tools that are suited to this kind of thing but they're the easiest and most available thing we've got.

The thing I find most exciting about this is volunteering to volunteer software engineering capacity to NY. I hope you’re able to source more opportunities like that.

I have a hypothesis that a lot of young software developers would love to do something like the US Digital Service[1] if they could do it remotely. Some of the young software engineers I work with make enough money in a couple years to take a couple years off (which they then proceed to do) but they are also seeking a bit more meaning than that life can maybe provide.

I dream of helping states create their own USDSs. If anyone has any feedback on this hypothesis, I’d be curious to hear it.

[1] https://www.usds.gov/

I share your optimism about this, I'll see what people submit.

I just found https://developer.ibm.com/callforcode/getstarted/covid-19/ this morning, going to add it to my directory today.

The local business roundup is exactly what I have been wanting. Amazon makes searching for a product so easy, but almost always leads back to Chinese manufacture / business.

Any good sites for buying products made in country of choice? (such as USA)

Great idea! I've shared it over on https://crisis.directory too (which crowdsources ways for folks to get help vs offer help) :)

edit: fix link

Reply on news.ycombinator.com