One in eight Eastern Massachusetts residents will experience food insecurity this year due to Covid-19, according to the nonprofit Feeding America. One startup stepping up to the plate is LivelyHood.
Founded in March, the startup is providing meal and pharmacy delivery services to high-risk communities in Boston. LivelyHood has a two-sided platform where Bostonians can sign up to either volunteer or receive deliveries from existing programs in the city.
Upon signup, volunteers indicate where they live, how often they’d like to volunteer and what mode of transportation and they use. LivelyHood’s team uses that information to create a database, which is then used to match volunteers with people in need based on proximity and availability.
“It's contactless, it's globally integrated, and it's basically on-demand for the people requesting assistance as well as for the volunteers,” said co-founder and executive director Justin Lee.
LivelyHood has also set up a partnership program, through which it acts as a delivery service for various programs and organizations already established in Boston. Partners can login on the startup’s website and submit delivery requests on behalf of their constituents; LivelyHood’s infrastructure effectively acts as a “last-mile delivery service,” Lee said.
Lee said he and his team decided to add a partnership login after realizing they didn’t want to end up competing with existing food and resource delivery organizations.
“We didn't really want to compete with the existing ecosystem. We wanted to join it, we wanted to add to it, and we wanted to make it better, especially during a crisis,” Lee said. “We partner with various organizations that know of people in the community that need food. These organizations often have access to food themselves. They just don't have a way to get it to people safe in their homes.”
LivelyHood’s 200 volunteers are subject to a series of coronavirus-specific guidelines. For example, volunteers have to declare that they haven’t traveled recently and have no visible symptoms. The startup also uses contactless delivery protocols, such as leaving the food at the door and alerting the recipient that their food has arrived by phone.
LivelyHood provides its services free of charge. The company is able to complete deliveries for free because everyone at LivelyHood, from the delivery drivers to the engineers to the chief technology officer, volunteers their time to build and operate the organization.
Lee sees a future for LivelyHood beyond the pandemic. He plans to keep expanding the startup’s presence in Boston and helping people with its delivery platform, whether we’re facing a crisis or not.
“At the end of the day, what we're trying to do is conceptualize LivelyHood as a platform for transfer. Today we're, transferring food and we're also transferring our health purpose,” Lee said. “When a healthy young driver says, ‘I want to make deliveries’, they're transferring their privilege of either having access to a car or having access to a healthy immune system... Ultimately, at the end of the day, what we're super excited about is the fact that we’ve built a platform where people are transferring things altruistically.”
Emma Campbell is a contributing writer for BostInno.
