A Letter from the Founder: Our Helping Hands Story

September, 2020. NJPA Helping Hands began with a bold vision: can we help any individual who requests help in our local region, and can we provide a volunteer opportunity for anyone who wants to give back? To understand where we came from, let’s start at the beginning.

Early March, 2020. The Inspiration

I was a graduate student studying and teaching in Palo Alto. The world looked like it was ending. In one week, six counties — encompassing cities from Oakland to Santa Cruz — shut down. In this panic, our college community banded together to create a Mutual Aid Spreadsheet, offering groceries, counseling, housing, and financial assistance. It was a spectacular moment. In a time when our government was unable to help, individuals in our community took it upon themselves to support each other. The group made 400 offers to struggling community members, and over 200 received support to fly home or find a place to stay. Throughout the madness of the shutdown, I vividly remember us uniting through the mutual aid group to help stabilize one another.

A copy of our mutual aid spreadsheet.

Late March, 2020. Building a track record in LA

As we all moved our separate ways, we tried using technological outreach to serve communities beyond our bubble. In that vein, lahelpinghands.com formed, intending to match volunteers with senior citizens for grocery and prescription pickups. While progress was initially slow, after connecting to the LA Mayor’s Office, we made 15 matches per week for a total of 200 matches among our 100 volunteers. A great thanks to Priya Chatwani, Nisha Chatwani, and JJ Ram for their leadership in building the group and another thanks to AllTogetherLA for merging with us to serve the senior population in the greater LA area..

April 2020. Coming Home: Founding NJPA Helping Hands

Seeing the success generated in LA, the rising COVID cases in NJ, and that I was heading back home for the extended future, I knew I had to test if this same initiative could take off here: whether we could help at least one person from the ground up. So, I set up the organization njpahelpinghands.com, and did a publicity sprint, getting on mutual aid groups and reaching out to old contacts. One of them was Danica Bajaj, a close family friend. Seeing her enthusiasm gave our organization new light. We quickly built cross-county connections and linked with individuals, community partners, and volunteers who wanted to help. As a result,we succeeded in our initial goal of matching at least one volunteer to a community org, and of matching at least one person in need with helpful resources.. Now, the question was whether we could continue on or fold up.

July 2020. Rebranding Helping Hands to better serve our population

Around July, we found an interesting observation. While we were originally working with seniors, most of our outreach pulled in younger individuals asking for help, many between 20–65. Additionally, many of these individuals were struggling financially. These individuals did not need us to do their grocery shopping; rather, like the people on the Mutual Aid Sheet at Stanford, they needed help navigating housing solutions, figuring out how to resolve financial emergencies and a ear to listen to as they charted next steps. We were left with two options, either to let these people slip through the cracks, or restructure our program to support them. We decided on the latter.

Over the next few weeks, we recruited Joe Miscioscia and Ruhi Kanwar, two fantastic leaders, to run our Allyship and Virtual Companionship programs respectively. The Allyship program, modeled off of Crisis Peer Counseling trainings at Stanford University, has developed into an 8 week mentorship program, matching people with a trained local ally to receive the necessary support. While there is still work to be done, the allyship team includes 6–8 amazing volunteers that have served over 15 matches, a sizable amount considering we do not run on any significant donations. Nevertheless, many of our matches have received $50 direct assistance gift cards, showing that we put our money where our mouth is. 100% of our funds have gone directly towards people and partner organizations who are in financial need or to our website and legal maintenance, an indication that we stand for building a lean, grassroots operation.

The Virtual Companionship program is similarly working to restore assisted living centers with companionship and entertainment to their seniors despite isolation’s setbacks. While currently not as far along, we have built out the mechanisms to provide Cards & Crafts sessions for any senior center in our local area as well as eventual 1:1 weekly phone calls. Both programs are built for sustainable success; with each volunteer and engagement, we expect the two initiatives to grow organically.

Finally, we have committed to supporting our students and families as schools open live and virtually. We have partnered with numerous education organizations such that we can provide free STEM tutoring to any low income school as well as volunteer opportunities for people looking to make yearlong teaching commitments as well as short term teaching help. Put all together, Allyship, Virtual Companionship, and Online Tutoring make up our three pillars of our organization.

Our Goals / What Our Culture Stands For

We have taken careful thought to build out sustainable goals and values by which we measure ourselves as an organization. These core priorities are influenced by principles from my work at Microsoft, which is one of the most well-run organizations I have been a part of.

Our mission: Enable individuals in our community to achieve more by 1) supporting each person who requests help through our Get a Match form; 2) providing a volunteer opportunity for each person who requests one; and 3) collaborating with existing community organizations to support our shared missions.

To get there, we have the following three values:

1. Trust: In order for Helping Hands to work, there has to be significant trust, between the matches, volunteers, admins, and outside community. Trust is the steady way we can build the sustained, legitimate connections and success stories to further expand the organization.
2. End user focus: Helping Hands is not about the administration team. At the end of the day, we do very little. If it were not for our >80 volunteers and our >40 matches, Helping Hands wouldn’t exist. At all points, we need to be focusing on how our program is reaching or performing for our volunteers and matches. It is key that we never lose this focus, as this is what will make or break our organization.
3. Be Transparent and Collaborative: This value is much easier said than done; however, it may be one of the most important parts about building a successful nonprofit. We want each volunteer to have a personal incentive to do this work. By keeping our vision razor focused on our partners and our matches, we can chart a path towards sustainability and longer term impact. And moreover, by doing this, we make this organization not founder-first but rather mission-first.

Next Steps — We need you!

All of our next steps are geared towards the ambitious goal of advancing our programs towards sustainability. We want to see if the pulse that we’ve hit can continue on, even after COVID-19. On our end, we’ve taken steps, receiving Non-Profit status in NJ as well as receiving generous grants from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Peace First, and our friends at AllTogetherLA.

However, to succeed, we need you. We need people who believe that a local initiative can make an impact, and that their contributions matter. There is much work that needs to be done.

We are looking for:

a) individuals to help bolster our allyship and virtual companionship programs,

b) people with education backgrounds to support our tutoring programs, and

c) individuals to lead our matching processes and outreach efforts.

At the core of any successful community organization is its ability to unite people of vast interests under a common goal. We have already partnered with numerous organizations, ranging from the Bethesda Project combating homelessness in Philadelphia and the Cumberland County Health Department in NJ to the Black Brotherly Love Community Project in Philadelphia and Redefy. These organizations encourage existing community members and young students to get involved in social change projects. Our volunteer age-range is a testament to our unity, and so is the structure of our programs, providing our matches with three distinct services. At the end of the day, I believe that our strength stems from the solidarity of our one-of-a-kind community members, and we will continue to grow if everyone can lend a helping hand.

If you have any questions, please reach out at njpahelpinghands@gmail.com or call us at (609) 429-0580. Thank you for reading.