Giving Compass' Take:

• Eric J. Scholl provides donors with some shards of clarity on how to save lives during the coronavirus crisis.

• Scholl offers strategies for both large charities and small-scale funders. How can you use his advice to enhance your coronavirus giving? What can you do today to draw this epidemic closer to an end?

• Learn about other resources that need your support in closing out coronavirus.

For many charities, the Coronavirus landscape is something totally new. (It’s even changing the concept of volunteering, since you can’t really quickly amass a crowd of volunteers when they’re all being told to stay away from each other.) They want to compare it to Ebola or Hurricane Katrina. But it’s not comparable in terms of immediate needs, nor in magnitude. Charities want to have some idea of what probably works well before they start pouring buckets of money into it. But they don’t.

Here are a couple of suggestions we got from the “pros” on how big charities might best participate now and in the near future:

  • Set up, or work with public/private sector to make sanitizing stations mandatory at the entrance to every office building, supermarket, any public place.
  • Train volunteers, or recovered people, or people who might be out of work and willing to do it, on conducting COVID-19 tests, freeing up time for medical professionals to do other things.
  • A less “extreme” version of this might be as more masks become available, and people may be mandated to wear them in public, create an army of volunteers or unemployed people to do contactless delivery of masks to people who can’t go out and get them, or it’s too high risk for them.
  • Finding and transforming hotels, motels, workshare spaces, etc., into temporary treatment units. Find innovative solutions in areas where the government is falling short.

For now, the best advice we got and thus can give, is to keep your eyes open for needs that may come up in your specific community. Contribute where and how you’re comfortable, to the best of your ability. Let’s be safe out there, but that doesn’t have to cut into taking care of our people.

Read the full article about how to use your money to save lives by Eric J. Scholl at Medium.