Brooklyn Coronavirus Help Lists Swell With Volunteers

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK — They can shop for groceries or walk dogs. Some have cars to run errands. Others can give phone calls to check in or simply "whatever is needed."

Volunteers have flooded signup lists across Brooklyn and New York City with those offers of help for people at risk from the new coronavirus.

Lily Pollak helps manages one such list — "COVID-19 Support For Elderly and Immunocompromised in Brooklyn" — from her Park Slope home. It began as a collection of local postings she saw and gathered as the virus altered day-to-day life in her neighborhood.

Eventually Pollak and the list's other manager Melanie Bavaria — who, in true online fashion, Pollak has never met face-to-face — expanded it to a crowdsourced Google Doc open to all in Brooklyn. So far, 125 volunteers have signed up.

"I was very happy to see lots of people signing up but it’s not surprising to see people in New York City stepping up," Pollak said.

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One volunteer, Lauren Yaffe, posted she can do "whatever is needed" for people living in Park Slope and an wide assortment of Brooklyn neighborhoods.

"I love to walk!" she wrote. "Have shopping cart, will travel."

Yaffe said no one has contacted her so far but she's still willing to help, her own health permitting.

Until then, she said an email listserv for her Eighth Avenue helped her own family get help.

"I want to give a shoutout for the man across the street from me who is at this moment fixing up our bikes so our kids don’t have to use public transportation," she said Thursday afternoon.

Other lists focus on North Brooklyn, as first reported by the Gothamist, or are rapidly expanding into larger organizations like Invisible Hands.

With no end in sight for the coronavirus crisis, Pollak said she's going to keep her list going.

“We decided to keep the list going because the more the merrier and it’s more personal," she said. "The more people that see it the better."

Pollak encourages people to make deliveries and give help in the most socially-distanced ways possible, such as wearing gloves and leaving groceries outside doors. One helper even communicated with an elderly couple by standing below their second-floor window, she said.

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