'Community Helper' site launches to help neighbours during coronavirus pandemic

Montreal software engineer Jeff Zigman has developed a website to help communities get through the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. The site facilitates community leaders in organizing their members as volunteers to help those in need to get their day-to-day simple tasks done. Called Community Helper, it allows organizations and volunteers to become more organized and effective in handling the growing neighbourhood task lists popping up, often relating to helping the elderly in managing their living situation throughout the outbreak.

“I’ve had about 14 organizations sign up so far and over 40 volunteers in those organizations in the last week since building it. It’s free to sign up and I’m going to try to keep it free as long as I’m able" said Zigman, who also works as the Director of Software Development in a tech company.

As their website states, "Community Helper was created during the Corona Virus outbreak to help Communities (Organizations) to get instantly organized and efficient with their volunteers, especially in helping the elderly and anyone who can’t get out."

"The basic idea is that you create a community/group for your organization and community members can join as volunteers, and then it's essentially a task management system. Admins and people in the community can create tasks, or intake tasks submitted by community members with to-do lists, grocery lists, or medications that will need to be picked up etc," said Zigman.

"There will be summary reminders of what is unassigned, what's open and what tasks have been claimed. It's essentially a community-centric task management system. Don’t let the visuals of the landing page turn you off. I’ve kept it visually simple so I can focus on functionality and making sure it works well."

"This will make community members more aware of the skill sets that are available and what different members of the community have to offer so that it can help people find jobs or hire a specific person to do a task," Zingman said, "which is especially important for the professionals, even like dentists, who are barred from practicing their professions and have no way to make money."