During this global pandemic the government has advised everyone ’ to stay at home where possible and to adopt social distancing measures. The government has encouraged people ‘with increased risk of severe illness from the Coronavirus’ to take particularly stringent measures. Many have taken it upon themselves not to leave their houses at all. Increasingly, people are feeling bored, anxious and depressed, especially those living alone.
The Back Up Trust (a charity supporting those with spinal cord injuries), has been thinking of ways to help vulnerable people to cope with being stuck indoors. The charity wishes to organise weekly Zoom calls for anyone affected by a spinal cord injury.
As a volunteer for The Back Up Trust I was invited to a Zoom conference call to come up with ideas for these weekly calls.
There was a large group of us keen to give our input. After an initial introduction by The Back Up Trust staff we were split up into smaller groups otherwise known as ‘rooms’ on Zoom.
In our room there were 6 of us. We were all mentors / volunteers. Some of us are mentors to people with a spinal cord injury, others are mentors to people who have a family member with a spinal cord injury.
We came up with the following ideas for weekly Zoom calls
For the Zoom call’s name we thought of ‘Back Up together.’ We also thought that it might be a good idea to split groups into age categories. Then within the groups there would likely be both newly injured people and those who have been injured for longer periods of time. This would provide a good level of support.
We also spoke about fundraising. Although, we concluded that the support Zoom sessions should be kept separate from fundraising. This is because the sessions should be open to everyone and we don’t want to exclude people if they don’t have money to pay.
However, we acknowledged that during this time fundraising is extremely hard as Back Up events that usually take place can’t. Also, vital courses supporting those that need it won’t be able to run either. We spoke about how we could make these online instead.
Through arranging weekly calls for those feeling isolated we hope that we can support those that really need it.
Does anyone else have any ideas?