Corona Virus in Harringay – Neighbour Support

These are indeed tough times for us all. We’re in unknown territory, all facing varying levels of health, social and financial challenges. But, in amongst all that’s happening, neighbours are coming together: new connections at being forged and people are reaching out in a way they might not have done a month ago.  In Harringay a lot has been going on. So widespread is the involvement of local people, if you’re reading this you probably know someone who’s involved with the local Corona Virus Support initiative.

The aim of this post is to recap on what’s happened with the support network over the past week in Harringay, to review where things stand now and to reassure everyone that there’s a well organised, well-resourced local network standing ready to help out.

Aware of neighbour support initiatives springing up elsewhere, last week Hewitt Road resident Dermot realised that Harringay already had a ready-made online community tailor-made for this type of situation. So, he added a post to Harringay Online, asking people to put themselves forward to help out neighbours who are particularly impacted by the current crisis. 

To help centralise things on the website a ‘key signpost’ panel was set out front and centre of the home page and an area of the site (Corona Virus Group) was set aside to act as a signposting and communications hub for people to access the active network. 

In his initial posting on HoL, Dermot gave an email address for people to contact him.  The offers of help arrived in much greater numbers and much, much faster than he had imagined. So, within a couple of days, Dermot had established a WhatsApp group to help people interconnect.

But things moved fast and it wasn’t long before the single group had been split into six areas. That worked for Dermot. As he explained to me, “I wanted things to work at a small and local a scale as possible and before long, the area groups started morphing into street groups”.

What seems to be different about how local people are organising themselves for this issue is the extent to which organisation is distributed rather than centralised. Dermot told me that he doesn’t want to sit at the centre of things any longer than is necessary. “I really want to make my role redundant as soon as possible”, he explained.  And, WhatsApp is proving ideal as a self-organising tool. It’s remarkable how, across the neighbourhood, people are coming up with ideas, sharing them at street level and then those ideas are spread through the WhatsApp networks.

What’s also supporting the coordination of ideas and resources is a loose organising network that Dermot has put in place. He’s arranged for each street to have one or two ‘Street Admins’ whose role is to coordinate the support at a street level and to coordinate activity and to share best practice across the neighbourhood.

Initially the effort was focussed on the Ladder. But things quickly spread to all of Harringay, as well as to some parts of Stroud Green. On Wednesday, I got a call from Andy Newman of the Gardens Residents Association asking if they could formally use the HoL-originated initiative as their hub for co-ordinating support.

There are now about 35 street groups established and it’s got to the stage where Dermot has organised a virtual meeting for the street admins this weekend.

Even before that happens there’s been significant activity on the ground. 6,000 leaflets have been posted through letter boxes and more are on the way.

With all the groundwork well under way, I asked Dermot if any support had been called for yet. “Yes, certainly”, he told me, “it’s early days in the crisis as yet, but we’re already starting  to get requests. For example, someone’s asked for help with shopping and another for help with banking”.

“There have also been some great examples on HoL”, he continued. “A few days ago a couple of teachers who are self-isolating needed to borrow school-compatible computers to work from home. It didn’t take long before they had all sorts of offers”.

Then just this evening a doctor’s wife joined one of the WhatsApp groups to report that her doctor husband’s car had been vandalised in the hospital car park and the catalytic converter stolen. She made an appeal on the group for help to ensure that her husband could continue to travel to work to carry out his vital work. Within about 10 minutes, she had one offer of an older BMW, one of a VW Polo and a couple more unspecified offers. Not bad!!

As the requests come in, some of the challenges associated with offering sometimes sensitive support to strangers start to become clearer. Dermot and I have discussed issues including safety (avoiding creating the opportunity for scams and other crimes), practical payment issues associated with doing shopping for a neighbour, data handling and so on. Dermot is clearly taking these sorts of issues very seriously and it seems clear that the Harringay initiative will be well thought through and will build-in protocols for handling all sorts of sensitive issues.

Looking forward, I asked Dermot what else he needs to keep the initiative going. He told me that for the time being they’re doing well for volunteers, but some streets are still not covered. So don’t hold back from volunteering if you want to help out.

He’s particularly keen to build up a skills and resources bank. He was reluctant to single out particular things. He’s keen for people to volunteer whatever they feel they can contribute. But he did mention in passing things such as vehicles (with driver, I assume) and translation skills (for multi-lingual leaflets). 

Dermot has been spending about four hours each evening getting things in place. So, he’s well positioned to be aware of the longer-term issues the initiative faces. “The challenge will be keeping the momentum going. People are up for anything at the beginning”, he told me. “But as things go on people will start to drop out for whatever reason. Maybe they'll get ill themselves or it will all get a bit too much for them".

I asked Demot why he thought there had been such a good response in Harringay. “There just seems to be a lot of good will on the ground”, he said. “People are very willing to help out”.

“Harringay Online was also invaluable”, Dermot explianed. “A very high proportion of people who volunteered, found out about the initiative through HoL. Without it, I’d have found it very difficult to build things anywhere near as quickly. It’s also meant that we’re able to build a group of people who are already somewhat connected. We’re not all complete strangers”.

I take my hat off to Dermot. I know from having started HoL back in 2007 and working up the Neighbourhoods Connect initiative with Haringey Council in 2010 how time-consuming running this sort of thing can become. So, on behalf of the community I’d like to offer Dermot, in particular, along with all the street admins and volunteers a big thank you and a big community pat on the back.

If you'd like to get involved, start your journey with Dermot's group here.