Cando ingenuity creates volunteer model in Britain
LONDON — They just wanted to help. But they created a movement.
Four women from London’s Hackney Wick neighborhood responded to the coronavirus pandemic by organizing volunteers who so far have churned out more than 3,800 sets of scrubs for health care workers after Britain’s National Health Service was unable to provide enough of the garments.
More important, they helped organize a nation, putting together a template for making basic personal protection equipment, or PPE, with organizational ideas and a pattern for the scrubs so others could do the same. Now some 70 “Scrub Hubs” with more than 2,200 volunteers are busily sewing away from Scotland to Wales.
“Very quickly, we discovered that Hackney was not just the (only) place where PPE was needed,” said one organizer, Brooke Dennis, 33. “It was needed all across the land.”
Medical staff across the world have struggled to obtain enough personal protective equipment, including face shields, gloves and masks, to protect themselves from the virus as they work to save lives. As the crisis deepened, the situation only got worse, even as the British government insisted it had done all it could amid international shortages and disrupted supply lines.
Scrub Hub’s founders, none of whom knew each other five weeks ago, made contact during the early days of the crisis by using WhatsApp message groups to see if anyone in Hackney Wick needed help.
Charity worker Maya Ilany, 29, who knew how to organize campaigns, teamed up with Annabel Maguire, 31, who had expertise in buying fabric in bulk. The group soon included Rebecca Zehr, 47, a creative pattern cutter, and Dennis, who runs Make Town, a textiles and craft studio in east London that has morphed into the beating heart of Scrub Hub. Volunteers followed, and crowdfunding paid for materials.
Scrub Hub put its operations into an open source document that showed others how to do what they had done. Word spread.