When I decided that I wanted to help as many senior citizens as I can, I started calling old age homes and asking them if they needed any support with supplying medicines and medical equipment. I called many homes in Hyderabad and also checked if they were old age homes that charge their citizens or not as the paid old age homes are not as easy. Though there weren’t many old age homes that senior citizens didn’t need to pay for, I was able to find three of the most needy old age homes in Hyderabad. I started looking for a medical dealer to provide these old age homes with equipment and medicines but it was very hard to keep up with all of the medical dealers and find which dealer can give us the largest discount. This is when I realised that I should have a team to help me along the way as there were many tasks that needed to be done.
I reached out to my neighbourhood friends and wound up with a group of 4 people and they were very willing to help. We had a meeting the same day when I told them about the project. They were really happy that they could also do something to help senior citizens and we immediately started working. We looked at all of the medical dealers and realised that one of our teammates’ moms, a doctor, knew a medical dealer that could give us a better deal. We contacted the medical dealer and he was very willing to help.
We knew that we needed to receive funding in some way so we decided that we would go around the neighbourhood and collect money from our neighbours. We did this before corona was a very prevalent problem in India and made sure to wear masks and gloves while collecting the money. We received 60,000 rupees in funds which was an appreciable amount but we needed more to be able to provide medicines for these old age homes throughout the time that COVID is a problem.
I started a Ketto crowdfunding page with the help of my Dad and we spread the page around to different family members. We started getting more and more donations from different parts of the world. We also wanted to endorse the page on social media so we created a logo for COVID Care and made social media accounts for it. We started by making an instagram account and asked all of our friends to give us a shoutout. We quickly got many followers. Then, we made a facebook page which we updated throughout the process of different events in this project.
We went to see a doctor who has been reading many books on COVID and he has told us that COVID will be a problem until December so we started preparing to give these old age homes medicines for almost a year. Thankfully, we started getting funds from our crowdfunding page which were sufficient to help these old age homes. We have already collected all of the funds needed to help these old age homes and are hoping to collect more to help even more old age homes in the future.