On Thursday, March 12, I woke up with an idea. Coronavirus was beginning to spread in Boston, along with an uptick in fear and anxiety. The schools hadn’t been closed yet, but events were getting cancelled, social gatherings were turning to virtual, and entire households in my community were hunkering down and all but barricading their doors.
COVID-19 is scary and its mortality rates are sobering. But most of us will still be here next year. Human costs take the form of more than just lives lost.
I belong to a wonderful local community. Boston has a vast and diverse population of polyamorous people. The tapestry of community which grows and becomes enriched through consensual non-monogamy is awe-inspiring. In my experience, Boston poly folk are community-minded, imaginative, and compassionate. And part of the beauty and richness is that the community expands beyond my knowledge and connections and fades into the unknown – it’s delightful when I get to meet new friends I didn’t know I had yet.
The idea I woke up with was to figure out a way to enable different local poly folk to connect and give support to anyone else in the community who needed to self-isolate (due to illness) or self-quarantine (due to exposure) because of coronavirus. I saw the nervous energy practically sparking off the screen in social media and group chats. Everyone wanted to help – wanted to do something. The incoherent and chaotic messaging coming from our country’s leaders only lead to more fear, more anxiety. There was no one best place to throw money, labor, and effort to fight the pandemic. I wanted to create a way for my friends to channel this energy into something good, concrete, and helpful.
After a week of conferring with people and brainstorming, Quaranteam was born. This platform (built on Google Sites to launch a minimum viable product quickly), is a way for people to sign up to be Helpers, and know that they will be called upon to help if their friends or friends of friends are trapped in their houses. And, should anyone catch or be exposed to COVID-19 or have another temporary health condition complicated by all of society shutting down, they can fill out a quick survey and become a Helpee.
There are a lot of sites like this. The week leading up to Quaranteam’s launch saw several efforts at using the internet to connect help with the people who needed it. Several websites cropped up where you could sign up to be a Helper or Helpee (using Quaranteam’s terminiology), but so many of these were just lists.
Quaranteam differentiates itself from these in two ways:
1. It is a closed, local community
2. Captains
There are probably thousands of people who qualify as members of the extended Boston poly community, but it’s still restricted. This means that people are helping their friends and friends of friends, and we’re building good social juju in the process, partially making up for all of the cancelled parties. This also helps protect privacy, a big deal for several of the parents and professionals in our community who don’t want to be “outed” by being seen asking for help on this platform. An insular community design like this would work in many contexts – a church congregation might want to pull together in this situation, but that wouldn’t mean that it’s a good idea to them spread their help thin across all churches everywhere.
Captains are the community members who bring the Helpers and Helpees together. They work with Helpees to figure out what kind of support they need (a grocery run? virtual company while watching Netflix?) and recruit Helpers to deliver. If a Helpee is really sick and having trouble, the Captain is also a single point of contact – a Helpee can request a toilet paper delivery without having to wrangle their Helpers themselves.
Quaranteam has been growing at an amazing clip and, like any startup, there are pivots and surprises almost daily. Hold on to your butts!
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