The Gather My Crew is a secure platform created in 2017, coordinating help from friends, family, neighbours and colleagues. The platform can be used for any situation where coordinated help and support would benefit someone doing it tough, like a cancer diagnosis, sick child, premature baby, ageing parent, divorce, sudden death, accident, or bushfire recovery.
It can be used for people doing it tough to cope better and feel supported and for people who want to help to do something that is needed and makes a difference, both avoiding those uncomfortable conversations about asking for or offering help.
The platform technology simplifies the process of getting the right help to the person in need, benefiting both the person in need and those wanting to help. When using the Gather My Crew platform, you can:
- ask for help
- offer help
- accept help and
- manage all the help required.
How does it work?
The first step is to register with Gather My Crew and to create a ‘support crew’. You can select help needed from a list of common tasks and then sending a digital invite to friends and family. After that, family and friends select help, they can provide.
The platform is based in a ‘Gatherer’, that is the administrator. This person sets up and monitors the ‘crew’. It could be the person in need of someone who cares about them.
Gatherers need to:
- Create the account
- Select the help that is needed
- Invite Crew Members
- Monitor the account.
The ‘Crew Members’ ate the people who are providing the help. They could be family, friends, neighbours, colleagues, parents at school, people from your faith group and everything in between. The Gatherer MUST invite crew Members.
Invitations from the Gatherer contain a link to the ‘support crew’. Once an invitation is accepted, Crew Members can see the help needed and can select what they can do to help.
If you want to help but have not received an invitation, you could:
- Tell them about Gather My Crew so they can create an account.
- Offer to set up an account for them (become a Gatherer)
- Offer to be a Crew Member
- If you want to set up a Gather My Crew account for someone else, make sure you ask their permission first. It is essential that they can identify the help they need and who they want as Crew Members.
Are you not sure about how to ask for help?
Start with understanding all the help you need. When times get tough, it is often the buildup of small things that can tip us over the edge.
While this feels awful at the time, it also means that asking for small acts of help can have a BIG impact. Think of this as an opportunity to ‘offload’ some of the smaller tasks you would generally need to deal with.
The first step in making this happen is to understand all of the small tasks you need to complete to keep your life (and the lives of your family) running – don’t forget to think about the frequency of these tasks and changes that occur throughout the week. For example, you may need to make meals every day, but you only need the bedsheets changes once a week.
To help you create this list, the Gather My Crew has a ‘task list’, with over 80 tasks listed under eight categories. Here are the top 10 help requests from Gather My Crew. Consider adding some of these to your list:
- Cook dinner
- Do the laundry
- Come for a visit
- Bake lunch snacks
- Transport to an appointment
- Take kids to school
- Walk the dog
- Make lunchboxes
- Take carer out
- Arrange a playdate
Asking for help can be challenging – we get that. But it is also part of being human. We will all need help at some point in our lives, and we could all get better at asking for it.
So often people feel uncomfortable asking for help. People don’t want to put others out, or they don’t think their situation ‘deserves’ the support of others or how they don’t want others to believe they can’t cope.
Next time you start feeling uncomfortable to ask for help, here are a few things we would like you to remember:
- Knowing you need help and then confidently reaching out for it – shows the strength of character. It is not a sign of weakness.
- Asking for help is a skill. We must learn this skill – and then we need to practice it over and over again before we become good at it.
- People who care about you can feel helpless when you are going through a tough time. They should be given a task to do than to be left feeling unable to do anything.
- It does not need to be a huge act of help to make a big difference. It is the buildup of small things that can tip us over the edge when under stress. Consider offloading some of these small tasks to the people around you.
- People lead busy lives. Even though it feels awful when you ask someone for help, and they are not able to provide it – try not to take it personally.
- If you don’t ask for yourself – do it for others. Time and again, we have been told that being able to provide practical help to someone you care about is a ‘gift’.
- What goes around, comes around’. Yes, it may be you who is needing the support right now, but you can also be the first one to offer help to someone who is in your shoes next time.
We ALL benefit from a society that looks after each other. When it comes to helping those in need, research has shown that the ‘quality of life’ benefits of those doing the giving is equal to those who receive. It is a win-win.
Find here, some frequently asked questions about the platform.
Our team of warm, caring and professional staff are also dedicated to helping you in every way. Contact us on 1800 118 188 or access https://ahfunerals.com.au/arrange-a-funeral/grief-support/.