Katherine Waterston, best known for playing Tina in the Fantastic Beasts films, is a founding member of SpareHand, an app that matches volunteers with organizations to help others during the coronavirus pandemic.
“At the start of the pandemic, I got COVID-19 and was hospitalised here in London where I received fantastic treatment from the NHS. While I was recuperating at home and considering how I might meaningfully give back, my friend Scott Liddle told me about his idea for SpareHand and I immediately jumped on board. It’s been great to be part of SpareHand and to witness its phenomenal growth in just a couple of months. It’s been great to see how individuals and charities alike have taken to the service; to hear them rave about its ease of use is really encouraging. I have always suspected that there’s a large portion of the population who want to volunteer but are deterred from doing so because they don’t know how or where or, like me, they have schedules that make it difficult to commit to regular service – SpareHand solves all these problems.”
Katherine Waterston
SpareHand helps charities and community groups find and manage volunteers through an app. If you are in the United Kingdom and wish to sign up as a volunteer visit this page. Organizations in the UK requiring help can register here.
From the press release:
SpareHand, a free platform that is helping charities to match volunteers to tasks in their neighbourhood, announces today that it has prepared and delivered half a million meals during the coronavirus lockdown.
Set up in March 2020, SpareHand helps charities and community groups find and manage volunteers using a sophisticated algorithm to ensure high-quality matching of volunteers to those in need. The platform puts community groups and charities in the driving seat – giving them the tools to find, manage and schedule volunteers, reliably and at scale.
Over 3,000 volunteers have signed up, giving 27,000 hours of their time over the last 10 weeks. Volunteers include Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, Lashana Lynch, and Naomie Harris who have played their part in preparing and delivering meals for those vulnerable to the virus.
SpareHand was developed in partnership with HireHand, a tech start-up that has built the platform and sophisticated matching algorithm powering this Covid-19 reponse.
Some of the charity partners SpareHand has worked with include:
Bicester Pioneer Volunteers: packing 1 million meals as part of the Salute the NHS project. SpareHand is providing over 100 volunteers every day, 7 days per week, for this effort.
South Central Ambulance Service: SpareHand finds drivers to help with crucial PPE deliveries.
Magic Breakfast: SpareHand provides volunteers to deliver breakfast supplies from schools to kids in households in need – right across London.
Beyond the Covid-19 crisis, SpareHand seeks to reset fundamentally the way people think about volunteering, making it easy, fun, and meaningful – and crucially part of everyone’s weekly routine. The world will be different after the Coronavirus pandemic: strong communities will be at the heart of how we live and thrive.
