Community-based COVID-19 relief could be more effective. Here’s how.

Canada is about to face a massive food crisis. The second wave of COVID-19 will, unfortunately, be the challenge of getting food to the people in physical isolation because they are high-risk and the people who are hungry because they don’t have money.  

I had a phone call with a food bank last week, and they estimated that need has already risen 20 percent. It’s week two, and the economic consequences of job losses have barely started. 

In the face of this, communities are stepping up to protect their own. Everywhere, across Canada, communities are organizing spreadsheets and maps and projects and outreach, all living up to the beautiful hashtag, #caremongering. 

That’s also our job. We must help each other in a time of crisis. 

There are going to be serious challenges, from delivering cooked food to people with limited mobility to providing translation support for vulnerable minorities, that small communities cannot handle. 

But – and I hesitate to be negative in the face of this show of solidarity – these efforts are creating real risks. Maps are being shared online that identify who has resources, and who is shut-in. Crime will pick-up, and criminals will use these maps. Worse still, it is just a matter of time before there is further violence against COVID-19 victims – racist or generalized.  

Communities are sharing private information on open tables and spreadsheets. This information will be scraped and harvested and used for identity theft. Communities are taking on exposure risks (how will volunteers deliver food to a crowded building safely?); legal risks (what happens if a volunteer, while doing delivery, has a car accident?); and creating expectations that they may not be able to meet.  

Communities are also not going to be able to sustain these efforts using excel spreadsheets as the weeks turn into months. They are going to need to link their efforts to the formal system – military, federal, provincial, municipal and Red Cross alike. There are going to be serious challenges, from delivering cooked food to people with limited mobility to providing translation support for vulnerable minorities, that small communities cannot handle. 

Equally essentially, established organizations will also need the help of communities – they are simply not set-up for this magnitude of response. 

So how can Canada support a response that allows cooperation between all the different actors? Grocery stores, food banks, large NGOs, and communities? And how can we ensure that this system protects people, rather than creating vulnerabilities. 

The authorities — and their partners — must act soon. Three critical steps: 

First: Canadian communities need a standardized data framework for community response that is compliant with humanitarian data standards and humanitarian ethical and data privacy obligations. A small group of international humanitarians and Canadians have put together a few guidelines — a sheet on best-practices & privacy and a ‘good enough’ excel template here. This can easily be improved. Using a common data architecture (even if it’s as simple as a spreadsheet with a row of ‘tags’ identifying the data) will save a lot of time.  

Canadian communities need a standardized data framework for community response that is compliant with humanitarian data standards and humanitarian ethical and data privacy obligations.

Data ethicists, like the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, the Localization Lab and the Engine Room have all worked to understand the risks that compiling community data poses. The federal government and/or the Canadian Red Cross should, quickly, commission a list of dos and don’ts for data ethics from the world’s best actors – and share it across Canada (and the world). Our list above draws on this, but is a quick volunteer effort. 

Second: Canadian communities need a needs framework. Where should communities focus their limited resources, and what should they not do? Again, drawing on experience, I believe communities should focus on the challenge of getting food to people who need it, and on social outreach – phone calls to people in isolation. I have deep concerns about communities doing medicine delivery (controlled substances!) or getting involved in situations of violence, for example, which require strict protocols. 

Third: Everyone needs to start cooperating and making ad-hoc solutions inter-operable to figure out the holes. We haven’t done this, on this scale before – no-one has. Italy and China do not offer useful models, as their societies are organized very very differently. Italy, for example, has avoided food panics because its network of small shops have deep community relationships at individual levels – and are not ‘efficiently’ stocked.   

I’d love to see a combination of federal innovation funds, linked to a foundation, and a city or two – working quickly to build a community response platform that understands the details: the workflow of getting food to people, and the integrations that will need to support it. The core principle must be open-ness. Each community is different, and rather than one-app to rule them all, it’s one architecture to support them all. Test this, as fast as possible over the next four weeks in Ottawa and Vancouver, for example, then roll it out. 

My community in Ottawa is scrambling to do its best. As is every community across the country. Please give us the tools we need to be a part of this response — so that we can share the burden with our government — and so that we can effectively and ethically help our own.  

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