'I stopped feeling powerless': how donating to charities online helped my pandemic blues

When lockdown came into force I started walking – just for an hour, three or four miles at a time, to nowhere in particular. Like everyone, I was bewildered by the events of the pandemic and almost wholly convinced that it would all kind of blow over in a week or two. But then a week passed, and then two. In my flat in south London, my housemate and I watched the news each night with a growing sense of powerlessness.

The death toll was reported, the figures dissected, then re-reported and re-dissected. And alongside these were stories of myriad personal tragedies – of frontline workers who’d lost their lives, of families who’d lost their livelihoods and of the pain of isolation for those who had already been pretty isolated before the pandemic. On the one hand, I felt embarrassed that I was doing nothing, but on the other, so overwhelmed that it was hard to work out what, exactly, I should do.

It’s not as if before the pandemic I didn’t understand that there were people in the world who were struggling. But my own personal altruism was limited to one-off charity donations after major natural disasters and to a £7-a-month rolling payment to Amnesty International.

For years, when the homeless shelters opened each October, I had volunteered to help local homeless people in north London polish their CVs. But then I moved to a different part of the city and never looked into it again. I guess those small instances of giving had seemed enough. They were certainly enough to assuage my conscience.

Lockdown wore on and people talked about the “blitz spirit” and how it would help us through these difficult times. But to me this implied a kind of “batten-down-the-hatches” fortitude that seemed so out of step with the sheer volume of hardship that we were seeing. There was a lot of dead time in my week – my work as a writer had slowed, I don’t exactly trade in hard news so what I had to say felt a bit arbitrary – and that sense of powerlessness grew. The problem, as I saw it, was that I didn’t feel as if I had the right skills to make any kind of significant difference.

Scrolling through Instagram one afternoon I came across a friend who’d posted about a young carers charity in Sheffield, my home city. Young carers, she said, were getting a particularly raw deal in lockdown as they were often looking after parents who were deemed to be “high risk”. I googled the charity and started reading about some of its work, and how it took a hyper-local approach to helping young people.

The charity was too far away for me to go and help out – certainly while in lockdown – but I decided to donate a small amount. It wasn’t just the act of donating, it was researching and reading about the work it did and why it was necessary. I felt like I’d educated myself. I put a note in my calendar to check in with the charity a month down the line and see if there was more I could do.

I remembered then the words of a friend who worked as a war photographer. He had spent years documenting life in Syrian refugee camps. When I’d asked him how he could stand to see so much hardship and not just want to give up, he’d replied that he had wanted to give up. That it had seemed like too much bad stuff was happening for one person to make a difference. But he’d snapped himself out of it by doing one small good deed each day. “Even doing something small is better than doing nothing.” Wise words.

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A few days later, I saw a post by a local charity which ran food banks in my area. It was facing new challenges thanks to the need for PPE for its staff. I decided to make a small donation using the PayPal app, and again read a bit more about the kinds of work it was doing and who it was helping.

It was around then that the NHS volunteer service started. I signed up and took shopping to isolated people and picked up and dropped off medicines. I bought a bike so that I could do it quicker, and once a week cycled to those local food banks and left bread, tins of beans and fruit.

And since then, each week, I’ve also spent an afternoon seeking out small, local community organisations and charities to donate to. I don’t donate a lot, just what I’d otherwise spend on wine – £10 or so using PayPal, which makes the process so simple. I know these donations aren’t changing the world but, perhaps selfishly, they help me to manage the feelings of insurmountability and powerlessness, and for that I feel truly grateful.

At a time when many small charities are struggling, sending money to support their work is simple and secure. Just donate in the PayPal app