We live in the most connected world that has ever existed. Yet it can still be hard to find how you can help people in need other than just donating money. AnyoneCanHelp connects you with ways to use your knowledge and skills to do good, and help people in your spare time.
AnyoneCanHelp is a website & network of people dedicated to helping humanity. A place where you can use your existing skills to help people, share problems that need to be solved and collaborate with people all over the world to help solve them. A humanitarian problem solving network powered through crowd-sourced skills and resources, connecting people to problems their skills can help solve.
There is a remote hospital which has no road access to it. This hospital needs a certain amount of medicine XYZ to treat patients. Without this medicine, 10 people in this region die per month. Because the delivery is needed by plane, it is too expensive to be made regularly enough to save/help the amount of people who need the medicine.
With a conventional government or charity approach, we might look at building a new road. This for example might cost $100,000. Unfortunately for both the government and the charity, that cost is too much to commit, as they have other areas where the money is needed even more. They may have 10 people dying per month here, but elsewhere that may be 20 or 100 people per month, so they have to prioritise resources which is completely fair.
AnyoneCanHelp enables us to help further with a different approach. First, the project gets put online. This could be done by anyone at all, it could be a family member of one of the sick patients, it could be a nurse at the hospital, or simply a caring local - all they need is an internet connection or text message.
Now that it’s online, anyone in the world can contribute ideas and resources to help solve the problem and accomplish the project. Anyone with relevant skills is automatically emailed and asked if they’d like to help. Other people can also find the problem by searching on AnyoneCanHelp.
Naturally, people start coming up with ideas and working together to find a solution.
From these ideas, and through collaborative communication, we find out there is a town 100km away which has ample supply of this medicine. There’s a clinic there that is happy to donate a supply each month near the end of their expiry date. This helps, but doesn’t completely solve the problem, as we need a way to deliver it. Through the communities contribution, we find there’s a flight path near the hospital for planes flying to another town 400km away.
After determining this, the community is then able to find a local private pilot who takes this route once a month to deliver supplies to the other town. This pilot is happy to go 20 minutes out of their way once a month, to drop supplies to the remote hospital. It’s only a small detour for the pilot, who is happy to do it knowing they are helping.
Lastly, because the clinic cannot get the drug to the airport, the community finds members in the local area who drive vans, and are happy to dedicate 1 hour of their time each month to deliver the clinics supplies to the airport hanger, ready for the pilot.
Overall, we have only a few people who are contributing a very small amount of their time and resources, however by communicating and collaborating effectively, together they are having a large positive impact.
A local food charity collects leftover food from local shops and redistributes it to people in need. In doing this, one of their biggest expenses is delivery, including the cost of the trucks, the high fuel cost, and the loading and unloading costs. With AnyoneCanHelp, we can potentially eliminate all these costs.
The charity has 5 main destinations to deliver its food, and normally their trucks take 100 boxes each and drive the route once a week. A member of the community looks at the traffic-flow to the 5 main destinations, and discovers that there are thousands of cars that take each route every week, so we should be able to find people to help who drive the same route already.
Then, some members of the community who drive this route already, offer to help by taking 1 box each of food. They are happy to add 15 minutes to their commute once a week knowing they are helping people in need. They pick up the box from the charity and drop it off at the location. It is easy for them, but it has a large positive impact on the charity when multiplied by many community members. This means the charity can now use their resources to help even more people. This is promoted around the local community, by a member who prints signs and places them around town. Soon we have over 500 local AnyoneCanHelp members who are willing to help by taking 1 box each.
After not long, there are enough volunteers to add up to the charity no longer needing the trucks to deliver the food. They can use this saved money to help more people in need.
The system we have created is reliable because it has so many people, if one person cannot deliver a box one week, they can tell the community and find another person to. Or another member may have space for two boxes and can take the extra load. Each member is helping just one small part but overall they are having a large effective impact on people in need.
A hurricane has devastated a city, people are being evacuated and saved from floods and dangerous winds, but the chaos and bad weather makes it very hard for local authorities to move around the city and determine the worst affected areas. This is put onto AnyoneCanHelp and members throughout the area are asked to take a photo with their phone of the current situation in their area. Using the power of crowd-sourced help from other locations, these photos are then sorted by members of the community around the world. Because so many community members can help, the sorting process is extremely fast. Members classify each photo on a scale of 1 to 10, then these classifications are double checked by other members to ensure they are contextually accurate. Within minutes, we have a map of the worst affected areas and photos of them, all of which can be given to the authorities to dispatch help, and to more community members in the area who can help with their skills as well.
A community member has noticed that in their town it will soon be one of the coldest nights of the year, and many homeless people may be suffering. They post the problem to AnyoneCanHelp, which connects people in the local area together who might be willing to help. It notifies them of the problem, and the opportunity to donate any spare blankets they have. Because the network can automatically connect and notify these people, a far bigger donation can be organised than if an individual person was just asking their friends. Through connecting local people, families, and businesses, a large donation can be organised, and people without blankets that want to help can also donate their time using their car to help deliver the blankets. AnyoneCanHelp has then brought more people together, to have a larger positive impact than we would have had otherwise.