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It’s easy to careen through the day, barely conscious of our transactions large and small. Pay for a coffee with a wave of your phone, order a week’s groceries by voice command. And if a disaster has hit the news, you can donate money and sprinkle supportive emojis across social, just tap, tap, tap.
This is the age of insta-generosity, insta-consumption, insta-everything. And that’s not entirely a bad thing. We can raise vast amounts of aid in hours with the same tools we use to make sneakers appear on our doorstep. But in both cases, we’re scarily removed from the people on the other side of our screens. And that gulf between us has never been more acute than now as we live more of our lives remotely.
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Addressing this disconnect was a priority when mindfulness teacher and community activist Shelly Tygielski created a grassroots mutual aid organization called Pandemic of Love in March of 2020, just as the coronavirus was bearing down on her South Florida neighborhood.
As she writes in her new book, “Sit Down to Rise Up: How Radical Self-Care Can Change the World,” the concept was to match donors directly with those in need ensuring that there’d be an interaction between giver and receiver.
“What I’m proudest of is the fact that I purposely built Pandemic of Love to be sure that human beings could connect at a time of isolation,” says Shelly. “We could have taken money on behalf of people and then just distributed it, which is fine. But I knew that we all needed human interaction as much as anything else.”
A year and a half later, the organization has become a global phenomenon, connecting almost two million people who’ve shown up for each other and been changed by the experience. And in a year of many heroes, Shelly was named one of CNN’s 2020 Heroes of the Year, not just…
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Source : time
