Celebrating Lotsa Helping Hands

When your health fails you — where can you turn for help beyond the church or your immediate family or the hospital — to help you manage your care?  One source of power is a free online community called “Lotsa Helping Hands” that helps coordinate caregiving.

Here’s why LotsaHelpingHands.org was founded:

Lotsa Helping Hands was created to support family caregivers by empowering their family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and church or synagogue members – what we call a family’s ‘circles of community’ – who are eager to help them as they manage the daily tasks that become a challenge during times of family or medical crisis, caregiver exhaustion, or when caring for an elderly parent.

Our Vision
We believe in a world where building circles of caring communities becomes a recognized way to find meaning in both giving and receiving.

Our Story
We created Lotsa Helping Hands after witnessing four years of awe-inspiring community support and response to a family member’s serious medical crisis. Seeing how earnestly friends wanted to help, and juggling the difficulty of organizing their assistance, we designed Lotsa Helping Hands with the understanding of how to bring together a variety of social circles and what a resulting community like this would need. Lotsa Helping Hands is easy to use and requires no training for either the Lead Coordinator who creates the community or the members who participate.

I love the idea of LotsaHelpingHands because it uses technology to bring people together in a comfortable, and coordinated, effort to help those in need of assistance.

People often claim they want to help, but are too busy to help — and with Lotsa Helping Hands in the mix — you can pin down interest and reveal the convenient lie.

Have you ever had to coordinate care?  Were you able to make it happen on your own, or did you have to seek out help?  Are there other avenues for exploration that coordinate the same standard of care as Lotsa Helping Hands?