Introducing WeGotYou | A Community Volunteer Network During COVID-19

27 April 2020 — david-allen

WeGotYou is the brainchild of Citizen Sector – a UK non-profit – and Tectonica, a digital development company, who have come together to deliver a free website and app that lets people give and get help from their local community in order to stay at home safely during the COVID-19 crisis. They’ve brought together their skills and understanding of community organising and digital tools to help address some of the challenges created by this pandemic.

Called WeGotYou, the app and website hope to supplement and assist the incredible work already going on at a local level, including through mutual aid groups, to get help to those isolating and help volunteering activities scale through the use of digital tools while acknowledging the most vulnerable are not always online. Crucially, WeGotYou allows people to get help for others, outside their own neighbourhoods, such as a parent living in another part of the country of an elderly neighbour up the road. This is of particular importance to people currently receiving treatment for other things – like cancer – whose immune systems are compromised and are thus more vulnerable.

How Does It Work?

• Through the WeGotYou website, users can make requests for help for themselves or someone else, such as collecting shopping and medication.
• Through the WeGotYou app, users will see the requests for help closest to them, allowing them to take immediate action.

The mission is to use digital organising to improve the world we live in, and on an individual level, we all want to have a part in helping communities and individuals impacted by this crisis. We know that at the end of the day, technology alone will not save us; it’s the people and the communities we form that will. But technology can help us scale relationships and organise so that we can be sure that no one is left behind.

Being a good citizen has never – in peacetime – been so essential. All around the world, people want to do their bit and relieve some of the burden on the government and charities. WeGotYou helps people be good citizens and neighbours from their phone, supplementing the incredible work already going on in local communities everywhere. If you’d like someone to bring your mum some fresh milk or to collect and drop off vital medicine, WeGotYou can help.