COVID-19 Community Groups

Mark
We touched very briefly the other week – about these community groups. Facebook hubs and everything else like that to assist – do you want to talk a bit more about that.

Seamus
Yes, yeah there are quite a few local ones that have sort of popped up or people have just really started doing amazing things. So I thought I thought I’d still talk first about the one that I did mention last week last fortnight called Cairns Helpers and that’s a Facebook page. Just type in Cairns Helpers in Facebook or Cairns Community Helping Those In Quarantine. And that’s three amazing women in Cairns who’ve they’ve just done a huge amount of work they’ve set up this Facebook page are accepting donations and doing donation drives and then delivering stuff at home or getting it delivered to people. So yes, doing. It’s just really good community initiative and they’re just doing that. There are a couple of them are mothers, they’re all working, and that they’re doing this stuff on top of all of that. Yeah, quite amazing.

Mark
Cooktown Online Angels is another one that’s just popped up. But if you are wanting to start a group or something like that, how do you go about it?

Seamus
Well, one of the things that Facebook is that it’s very very easy so you can just sort of if you’re going to have your own Facebook page but then from there you can open either another page or a group, and there are reasons for doing both. And then you just start telling people about it and it’s, that’s so easy to do. That’s why a lot of people use Facebook. It’s very good. But, not, not always easy to find stuff. After some time – it’s really good for sharing immediate information. And for a lot of these things, that’s what you want but sometimes you just want a little bit more you want some, a storage spot for finding resources or finding offers of help. So, a couple of the other ones we talked about later are on websites were sort of easy to find bits of information. But Facebook is probably the easiest and the best way to really start

Mark
OK, and what it is, and a lot of people are talking and finding that a lot of neighbourhoods a lot of communities, come together because there’s no other way around it. And people are starting to learn their neighbours’ names, which is pretty amazing

Seamus
It really is. Yeah. And there’s a site called Viral Kindness. And that has a list of all the Facebook groups that it can find in Australia, or people are putting them in there so you can do a search on that and see if there’s a group near you. And that can help you create a group as well so that’s another one to be aware of. I’ll give you all those links, later on, to put on your website so that people can follow these up, including that new one that you just mentioned that called Cooktown Online Angels.

Mark
They’re popping all over the place – you go on to that Viral Kindness and what does it do? Links to other places.

Seamus
Yeah, so it’s got links of all local groups that it knows of in Australia. So you can just go in – there’s a map of Australia, there and you can just click on your area. I do notice that the two Facebook pages, we’ve got here are the three now, are not listed on their site the people who are running the Facebook groups – you have to add yourself to this site. But it’s a really good idea to add yourself so just so people know what’s available. Because as you say there’s not a lot of new ones coming out

Mark
How do you protect yourself from spammers

Seamus
You almost always need a decent moderator. There’s no sort of easy way around that, which is unfortunate but it’s not that hard – a lot of people know about Facebook so it’s fairly easy to get someone who wants to volunteer to be a moderator. And that’s, that’s easy to set up, I think, I don’t know how many moderators the Cairns one has got but the Tablelands one which I was going to talk about next, they’ve got three or four moderators who just help in the background to sort of just, you know, check things and make sure there’s no spam and rubbish in there.

Seamus
There’s another Facebook group called Tablelands Unite and then the subtitle is Helping each other through COVID-19. And that was founded by a local woman called Bree Hargreaves, and she’s done a huge amount of work for that. And they’ve, she’s got for four and a half thousand members on that, that Facebook group, just in the Tablelands, so that’s an incredible initiative and she’s done just got all sorts of stuff in there anything that’s valid and relevant for helping the local community is on that site.

Mark
Anyone that has these sites setup up to help a local community they can let us know here at Black Star Radio. We can also promote on our website

Seamus
Yeah, that would be absolutely lovely because it’s all community help and it’s the good thing about this coronavirus scare that people are joining together in community efforts.

Mark
Very quickly though before we get going, the NBN seems to be having a lot of trouble with being overloaded.

Seamus
Yeah, it wasn’t designed for this sort of thing, the original design was a really good design but then it was watered down by government and it’s now coming back to bite us in the bum.

Seamus
Can I just mention two others quickly? Two other places in the Tablelands-specific. One is an initiative put out by Startup & Innovation Tablelands, of which I’m a member, which is a volunteer group but that’s put out by Startup & Innovation Tablelands and the Atherton Tablelands Chamber of Commerce with help from the Tablelands Regional Council. And that’s a website called Tablelands Unite Together. And that’s just – if you want to help people, or you would like people to help you, or you’ve got some useful research sources or you want to add a business service because you’re offering a good service. That’s the place for that there and that’s called together.startuptablelands.org.

Seamus
And the final one, just quickly, is another innovation by Startup & Innovation Tablelands, together with Advance Queensland and the Tablelands Regional Council, and this is for local businesses. If you want to change your business to stay in business which you almost certainly will have to do. You can get up to three one-hour free sessions from local business experts on:

• Business strategy, planning, operations and/or finance
• Human Resources
• Online business development & setup, Digital Marketing
• IT, technology, remote-working and online services or if you’re, you know, re-doing your website.

So those are all free things you just have to go to the startup table lands.org website and look for COVID-19 Business Lifeline. And I’d get in there quick because we’ve got some funding to run that. But the funding may run out fairly so shortly so if you want, you know, three hours of free help from local business mentors, go for that.

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