‘The Good Guys’ on the go
The Good Guys care team — composed of employees from SM Development Corporation (SMDC) — has recently launched an initiative aimed at helping out senior citizens unable to shop for groceries for themselves amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.
The team is a group of volunteer SMDC employees who regularly call selected residents to provide shopping services for elderlies who live independently as they take their orders — along with their Senior Citizen ID cards, prescriptions, medicine booklets and authorization letters — and arrange for these to be bought by a team of riders who bring them to the condo’s lobby guard.
The initiative is part of a bigger program called The Good Guys, launched in 2019 – which conducts community-building activities across SMDC properties, ranging from emergency preparedness trainings to family fun days called Happynings, to health and wellness talks and sports and fitness activities.
A key sub-component of the program is one that gives special attention to the elderlies, PWD and other vulnerable groups.
At the onset of the lockdown, The Good Guys team immediately got together to identify the challenges that SMDC residents could be facing as a result of the lockdown, as employees were quick to offer a solution to address the needs of elderlies living alone. They
The team did a quick scan of the elderly SMDC residents, who either lived alone or were living with fellow-elderlies or with minors and the program has been running for almost two months, servicing nine SMDC properties across the capital.
Items are delivered the same day they are ordered, or, at the very least, within 24 hours and not even typhoon “Ambo,” which hit the country last month, could stop the Good Guys riders from delivering pre-ordered grocery and medicine items.
The program may have started as a simple shopping assistance for the vulnerable, but it has evolved to serve another important purpose. Having someone call them on a regular basis gives these elderlies the sense of community that they have been missing.