Corona Crisis: Use CiviCRM to organise neighbourly help in your community

Published
2020-03-27 10:39
Written by
We live in challenging times, and we should now help each other more then ever - especially when on lockdown.
 
We created a CiviCRM extension to coordinate help for the vulnerable and most affected members of your neighbourhood, community, town or county. It provides two simple public forms, where people can sign up either to request or offer help. These forms then create CiviCRM contacts with the help requests/offers stored in custom fields.
 
As a next step the included algorithm automatically matches and assigns the best suited helpers to the people in need, based on distance, type of help, and helper workload. All you have to do, is to confirm the created helper relationship and communicate the assignments to the people.
 
Types of help could simply be a general "any", or specific ones like "walk the dog", "do the shopping" or "pick up parcels". You can configure as many as you want, or simply stick with "any" to just connect people for whatever they need.
 
You can simply use your existing CiviCRM instance, or a fresh installation. All you need is the extension, and a working geocoder like Google or OSM.
 
Be aware that this extension is brand new, and has only yesterday been put live with one of our customers. We'd love to get feedback from you in the comments or on github, and we'd also be very happy to get some additional funding for bugfixes or new features as we've exceeded the budget quite spectacularly :)
 
Stay safe and healthy!
Björn, SYSTOPIA
 
Links:
 
  1. The MutualAid extension: readme, repository, download
  2. XCM extension 1.7-beta used for contact matching and creation (required): readme, download
  3. OSM Geocoder (if you don't want to use Google): download

Comments

For anyone interested and wanting to discus Systopia's extension – there's a dedicated channel on Mattermost: https://chat.civicrm.org/civicrm/channels/covid-19. We're hoping to have a version you can try running on Spark soon.

Thanks for this nice extension. For anyone who want to have a play with it checkout https://corona.civicrm.jaapjansma.nl and login with username admin and password admin1234

Grateful that you made this available. I'm failing to see where a requester or helper can specify help types. Enabling all the options in https://corona.civicrm.jaapjansma.nl/civicrm/admin/options Mutual Aid - Help Types Options didn't have any effect. Do you know how/where the respondent would specify the types of help needed/offered?