What happens when you sign up to donate to CRiTiCALL? Placement Officer Julie Daly gives us the lowdown:
In normal times here DCVC, we focus on helping to connect organisations to people who want to volunteer. The CRiTiCALL initiative has been something new for us as we are actually running the programme, rather than just helping find volunteers to help out.
CRiTiCALL helps people leaving domestic abuse in 3 ways:
- Offering letters of support
- Providing necessary and practical goods such as bedding, toiletries and food.
- Donating housing on a temporary basis to those in need.
It takes a fair bit of coordination to get donations from donors to recipients in a safe way while ensuring the security and privacy of recipients. Covid-19 requires an extra layer of planning to make sure everyone involved stays well.
When you apply to make a donation, I ask you for details on what you are donating and availability to drop off your items on one of our donation days. All this info goes into a spreadsheet which is shared with Brad, a volunteer with Serve the City who coordinates donations and organises volunteers to help out on the day.
The Iveagh Trust generously provides our storage and packing space for donation days, when the Serve the City team receives and sorts the different types of donations. All donations and donors get recorded on the day and entered into our records by me – but let’s stay with the donations. It’s ok, I know that part is more exciting.
In the run up to the donation day, Kelley, one of the founders of the CRiTiCALL, gets in touch with the managers of refuges across Dublin, Wicklow, and surrounding areas, to find out what they need. How many families are moving into houses or apartments? How many new arrivals need basic supplies? How many children and how old? If there are special requests, such as baby furniture or a particular phone charger, Brad might include that in the email announcing the donation day.
Then Kelley allocates the donations according to these requests .The brilliant thing is that the refuges don’t need storage space for the programme: they receive only what they need and can use. Any extra items can be sent to refuges in other counties who run their own CRiTiCALL programme. Donations are delivered discreetly in ordinary shopping bags, and the safety of the recipients is preserved as the deliveries are made by a member of the guards.
And voila – life is made that little bit easier for people in a terrible situation. Obviously not having to buy shampoo doesn’t instantly make the trauma of domestic violence go away, but it does mean one less little worry, and a bit more time that can be spent on healing.
From my vantage point wielding emails and spreadsheets, I don’t get the fun of sorting through donations or making up kits, but I do have the pleasure of talking to all of the donors and getting a glimpse of the effort and motivation behind the ‘stuff’. I’ve been particularly touched by the number of donors who, without any prompting from me, rally their friends and family to put together truly impressive donations. When we launched this campaign, I imagined people adding one or two things to their weekly shopping; I never pictured that the donor I was emailing might get her street together to provide a whole apartment’s worth of cleaning supplies, pantry staples, and bedding.
That kind of scenario has happened again and again, and when I think about how the pandemic has made it harder for us all to connect it’s even more heart-warming to think about how people have been brought together to help others going through a truly wrenching experience. Domestic abuse is a crime that thrives on ignorance and silence, and I like to think that our volunteers might also be having a preventative effect – by sharing their participation in CRiTiCALL with others, they are raising awareness that might help stop a future bad situation from getting even worse.
CRiTiCALL has been a really unique initiative to be part of during this strangest of years, and I hope if you haven’t gotten involved yet, you’ll consider it!
Dublin City Volunteer Centre has teamed up with Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Safe Ireland, The Iveagh Trust and other volunteer centres around Ireland to create CRiTiCALL – an initiative to support people emerging from domestic abuse during the Covid-19 pandemic.