Invisible Hands

Liam Elkind is Co-Founder and Co-President of Invisible Hands. His work on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic delivering to those most in need has been highlighted by the New York Times, the New Yorker, Fox & Friends, Good Morning America, and Andrea Mitchell Reports, among others. A Webby Award and George Bush Points of Light Award winner, Elkind is an undergraduate student at Yale University, studying Ethics, Politics, and Economics -- with the hopes of bringing more ethics to our politics and our economics. He serves on the Executive Boards of the Yale College Democrats and Yale Student Class Council, and has worked as Finance Director for Eli Sabin’s campaign for New Haven City Alderman. He believes in the tenets of servant leadership, and hopes to see everybody in a non-Zoom capacity soon.

COVID-19 places acute logistical pressure on the elderly, immunocompromised, sick, and disabled, who are unable to go outside to purchase food, prescriptions, and other necessities. Stay-at-home orders and rising economic instability yield increased food insecurity and inaccessibility among the most vulnerable in our communities. 

Invisible Hands is a volunteer organization providing free, friendly, contactless deliveries from grocery stores, pharmacies, and food pantries to those in need. No physical contact is ever made, but our volunteers establish a social connection with their recipients, many of whom are facing the profound challenges of isolation. Formed just three months ago, Invisible Hands has already recruited over 14,000 volunteers and delivered over $1,000,000 in food and medicine to those most in need during this crisis. We have expanded to serve all five boroughs of New York City, as well as Long Island, Westchester, Philadelphia, and parts of New Jersey. 

More than one in ten households in the United States are food-insecure. In New York, more than one in four people are food-insecure. At the same time, the United States wastes an estimated 30-40% of its food supply annually. Coronavirus has unveiled and exacerbated this disparity, particularly among vulnerable communities, including the impoverished, the elderly, the immunocompromised, and the disabled. 98% of food pantries have reported an increase in demand, with increases ranging from 50-100%. Large delivery supply chains are struggling to fill this gap, often resulting in lag times of a week or more. 

Furthermore, distancing protocols lead to social isolation, which can have damaging effects on community members’ psychological well-being. Researchers have found that social isolation can be as lethal as smoking 15 cigarettes every day. For the homebound, isolation has become all too familiar.

Invisible Hands solves both the logistical problem of food delivery and the deeper hunger of isolation. We deliver to residents in need, allowing people to stay home and practice distancing. We obey all CDC-recommended guidelines for distancing, yet ensure that we form social bonds with those to whom we deliver. Rather than socially distancing, we physically distance while socially engaging.

Invisible Hands is a group of over 14,000 volunteers who deliver food, medicine, and other necessities to those in need. Anybody in need of a free delivery can contact Invisible Hands through our website or Call Center. The recipient specifies their home address and order, as well as their preferred store. We relay the request to all the Invisible Hands volunteers in the neighborhood, and one volunteer claims the delivery. We coach the volunteer through the delivery every step of the way, ensuring they obey all proper distancing and hygiene guidelines. The volunteer calls the recipient on the phone and establishes a social connection, promoting community and ties of friendship. The volunteer drops the delivery off at the resident’s home, receives reimbursement under the door if necessary, and backs away to a distance of six feet.

In addition to providing free delivery services to at-risk residents, we have delivered thousands of pounds of free food through partnerships with food pantries, mutual aid organizations, religious institutions, and other community stakeholders. Rather than wasting a workday in a crowded line for a food pantry, low-income residents can use our delivery system to work during the day and still receive their food.

Invisible Hands primarily targets the elderly, the immunocompromised, the sick, and the disabled. However, anyone may submit an order. We currently serve all five boroughs of New York City, as well as Long Island, Westchester, Philadelphia, and parts of New Jersey. 

As the COVID-19 pandemic evolves, so does our organization. Fortunately, our novelty has allowed us to grow with agility and adaptability. We have been able to consistently expand into new areas to meet the ever-growing demand. We have built out a partnerships program with food pantries to provide free food to those in need and thus address the deeper problem of food insecurity. When Governor Cuomo announced an executive order requiring everyone to wear masks, we set up “Glove Hubs” around the city so our volunteers could pick up PPE for free, empowering them to complete deliveries safely and legally. 

We have spoken with numerous senior centers, homeless shelters, and food pantries to better understand the landscape of food insecurity and poverty within the communities we serve. Even after the pandemic ebbs, the profound inequities left in its wake will pervade. We will continue delivering free food to the food-insecure long after the immediate crisis is averted.

People with disabilities, the immunocompromised, and the elderly have been woefully underserved throughout this pandemic. From cuts in special education to ravaged senior centers, the most vulnerable in our communities have been left without the support they critically need. Our free delivery mechanism and the friendships that ensue allows these vulnerable populations to feel safe and cared for. Furthermore, by delivering free food to the food-insecure, we help flatten the curve and ensure that those living in poverty will have access to healthy food as well.

Throughout Spring of 2020, I would see my father, a doctor, put on his mask and go into work each day. He would come home, after nineteen-hour shifts, and go to sleep without saying a word. I knew I had to do more to serve my community, particularly with the abundance of time I had on my frequently-washed hands.

That’s when I saw a post on Facebook from my friend Simone. She was asking if anyone knew of a volunteer service that connected young people to deliver groceries to those most at-risk. I reached out and said, “What if we made that service?” We built a website and a couple flyers, and passed them around. 

Within three days, we had over 2,000 volunteers. In the three months since, we’ve recruited over 14,000 volunteers, had our flyers translated into sixteen languages, and delivered over $1,000,000 in food and medicine to the at-risk and in-need. We’ve been featured in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Good Morning America, Fox and Friends, Andrea Mitchell Reports, and more. We’ve received support from across the world, people stepping up to help out in any way they could during this time of crisis.

As a proud New Yorker, I am horrified to see the destruction wrought on my community by this disease. Cramped up in our small apartments, it remains terrifying to go outside. My generation feels compelled to serve by delivering essential items directly to people’s homes, allowing vulnerable community members to stay safe.

I received an email recently from a woman living in Michigan, who told me that her 83 year-old father lived alone in New York. He had been diagnosed with COVID, and had no way of getting food. She heard about our service, and placed an order. His volunteer would come to his apartment every week with food and medicine. And they would sit, on either side of his door, and they’d just talk. About their lives, their fears, and their joys. They became friends. And when he passed away, his daughter said that that volunteer was able to be a comforting presence, to be a friend. To be there when she couldn’t be.

That’s why I’m passionate about this project. Because it’s been a profound reminder that, even as the world pulls us apart, we will always pull together. And that by pulling together, we will pull through.

After graduating as Valedictorian in a class of 850 students from Stuyvesant High School in New York City, I enrolled at Yale University, where I am currently a rising senior double-majoring in Ethics, Politics, and Economics and Global Affairs (because I believe we need to bring more ethics to our politics, economics, and Global Affairs). I have served in the Yale Class Council and the Yale College Democrats, and have led dozens of volunteers through phonebanks, fundraising activities, and letter-writing campaigns. I have recruited, engaged, and trained dozens of young volunteers to serve as ambassadors for political campaigns. I am also the Founder and President of Registration Is Student Empowerment (RISE), an on-campus group devoted to the proposition that when we all vote, we all rise. My work simplifying the process of voting absentee enabled over 400 Yale students to vote in 2019; we have since expanded to six partner colleges.

Most importantly, my experience working with hungry and isolated communities with Invisible Hands has acquainted me with the depth of food insecurity in New York City and the US more broadly. I know how to mobilize thousands of people in pursuit of a common goal, and have successfully led our vast team to successfully help flatten the curve in New York. Next, we hope to expand nationwide to serve communities throughout the United States (and potentially internationally, depending on capacity and demand).

With our first donations, Invisible Hands began a $30 weekly food subsidy program. With this program, we began serving hundreds of residents per week. However, word spread too quickly. We received desperate calls from homeless shelters in need of hundreds of meals. The New York City government was so inundated that they began referring people to us. Bernie Sanders emailed my personal phone number to his panlist, advising people to call me for free food. We would have gone bankrupt within three days.

So it was with a broken heart that I shut down our subsidy program. Our recipients were devastated; many had come to rely on us, and the $31,000 we had spent was a drop in the bucket of food insecurity in New York. 

Since then, our team has worked diligently to develop new, creative ways to feed the poor and hungry in New York and beyond. Partnering with local religious institutions, mutual aid organizations, and food pantries, we have completed over 1,000 deliveries of free food. And we’re just getting started -- we aim to partner with at least 25 pantries by the end of 2020 to fight the scourge of food insecurity.

In the 2016 Presidential election, only 46% of eligible voters in my age demographic participated in our democracy -- 40 million young people went without a voice in our democracy. Studies have suggested that college students don’t vote because they can’t figure out how to mail an absentee ballot. To remedy this problem, I began an on-campus organization, RISE (Registration Is Student Empowerment), devoted to registering and turning out young student voters. 

I simplified the absentee voting process for hundreds of college voters by leveraging extant student databases to curate lists of student voters in each state and target voters in states with elections. We created pre-filled ballot applications and pre-stamped, pre-addressed envelopes. All the voter has to do is sign. I recruited dozens of volunteers to help in the process, and together we delivered ballots throughout Yale College, helping to boost Yale voter turnout in 2019 by hundreds of votes. We have since expanded to six other colleges, and plan to help young people vote more easily by mail in the upcoming Presidential election.

Invisible Hands is a fiscally-sponsored project of the Giving Back Fund.

Invisible Hands was formed before any of the founders met in person. The organization was developed entirely online, through web hosting servers and Slack, our online workspace management system. We publicized our organization entirely through social media and remote interviews. All our volunteers operate remotely. We have created a company and a community that operates entirely in the cloud, without any physical contact. We have also innovated the delivery dispatch system by sending notifications right to volunteers’ mobile devices with updates on deliveries in their areas. Volunteers can complete deliveries on their own time, removing any need to sign up for shifts. This freedom allows us to complete almost all deliveries in under forty-eight hours, much more quickly than FreshDirect or other comparable corporate systems.

Furthermore, we have catalyzed a primarily young and healthy (i.e. lower-risk) population of volunteers, creating a high ceiling of volunteer capacity -- particularly in urban centers. Our volunteers’ human networks help us identify areas of need, rather than relying on cumbersome centralized data collection and distribution. 

While we strictly follow all applicable distancing protocols, our grassroots nature allows us to emphasize social contact and support. Invisible Hands is not merely a transactional delivery service, but actively promotes social engagement in an era of physical distancing. 

Finally, we prioritize serving the food-insecure, a population underserved by for-profit delivery systems. Through partnerships with local mutual aid organizations and food pantries, we work to reduce the food insecurity that now impacts one in four New Yorkers.

People in areas with high concentrations of the COVID-19 virus find it difficult to access safe, healthy food. Staple delivery systems are ill-equipped to remedy this problem, posting wait times of up to several weeks. Residents are forced with the impossible choice of risking their lives in a global pandemic by going to the store or starving without food. By leveraging the power of everyday community volunteers and organizers, we complete efficient and free deliveries of essentials (food, medicine, etc.) to those in need during the COVID-19 pandemic, thus solving the immediate problem of food inaccessibility. 

Long-term, through strategic partnerships with food providers and funders, we will combat food insecurity on a broad scale throughout impoverished communities. Many food-insecure people do not go to food pantries due to social stigma. Our delivery system is discrete, and enables us to complete deliveries without undermining our recipients' dignity. Invisible Hands also enables food-insecure families to avoid waiting in crowded lines and provides them with easy access to safe, healthy food. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this will have the effect of “flattening the curve” through improved social distancing, and minimizing economic and racial disparities in food and medicine accessibility. Beyond the pandemic, our long-term impact will be the reduction of food waste and improvement in communal bonds through the friendly delivery of essentials directly to those who need it most.

These numbers are largely contingent upon the prevalence of COVID-19 within New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and our other service areas, but we aim to serve 50,000 people by the end of 2020. In all honesty, it is near-impossible to predict our impact five years from now, as we are only a few months old and much of our service is geared toward immediate crisis response. However, given our ascendant food pantry delivery program and the compounding food insecurity throughout the United States, we aim to serve 400,000 people over the next five years, with an ever-increasing focus on delivering free food. We are also considering a Canadian expansion, though this will depend on (a) our success in the United States, (b) the demand in Canadian provinces, and (c) our legal ability to expand internationally.

Within the next year, we hope to have a nationwide program that covers at least 40% of the continental United States. We aim to complete an Android/iOS app for volunteers that will streamline the delivery dispatch process while retaining the community chat features that empower volunteers to communicate with and support one another. We aim to serve 50,000 community members with healthy food. 

While it is difficult to establish long-term goals as a young organization in the midst of a global pandemic, we anticipate a long-term impact on food insecurity through strategic partnerships with food pantries, mutual aid organizations, and religious institutions, which have deep roots in their communities and are able to provide both curated lists of those in need as well as food for our volunteers to deliver, or funding with which our volunteers can shop. Within five years, we aim to broaden our base to serve 80% of the continental United States, and to serve 125,000 community members. While we hope the COVID-19 pandemic will be long-gone by then, the disparities and economic turmoil left in its wake will pervade our communities for years to come. Invisible Hands will be at the ready on the front lines to help.

Our biggest barrier to scale is technical. Currently, all our operations run in Slack, a workspace communications platform that serves as the hub of our delivery system. However, Slack is large, unwieldy, and expensive. It is unintuitive, complex, and for volunteers, disinviting. It also hampers our ability to scale rapidly.

Volunteer engagement will also become a growing problem, as our volunteers burn out or return to work. While we have been lucky to receive positive acclaim from national news media, large corporations, and social media, we are clear-eyed about the importance of continual outreach to both potential recipients and potential volunteers. 

Finally, the ever-changing landscape of the COVID crisis makes it difficult to know if we are “on track” to complete our goals -- indeed, the vicissitudes of the current landscape leave open the possibility of a necessary change in goals. This volatility is a barrier because, the larger we become as an organization, the more difficult it will be for us to shift our service in a major direction.

To overcome our technical problems, we hope to develop an iOS/Android app that will replicate the core community-building functionality of Slack through direct messaging, neighborhood threads, and curated community-wide threads, while streamlining the delivery matching process and saving resources in the long run. We have a team of eleven pro bono engineers and developers, and plan to hire two ReactNative coders to work full time on this project.

To increase volunteer engagement, we hope to provide volunteers with custom apparel and other ‘perks’. We hope to recruit new volunteers through a mix of social media, partnerships with other volunteer organizations and companies, and television appearances. We aim to reach new recipients through print and television media, as well as through partnerships with local governments and senior centers.

Finally, to maintain our adaptability in an ever-changing environment, we will engage and promote local leaders throughout our organization, empowering them with decision-making power over the direction of their local chapter, specifically with respect to the development and deployment of strategic partnerships with food providers and community-based organizations in the area. This will help us grow our efforts while retaining our grassroots nature.

We have partners on both the administrative and the operational side. We retain pro-bono legal counsel from Weil, Gotshal & Manges. We are fiscally sponsored by the Giving Back Fund. We receive consulting and accounting help from Grant Thornton. We partner with User1st to ensure web accessibility for the visually- and motor-impaired. We partner with Slack, MailChimp, and other platforms to utilize their services for free trials. We work closely with Crowdskout, a volunteer engagement platform, to maintain digital contact with our volunteers in an era of distancing. We also receive funding and administrative support from the Robin Hood Foundation, the Brooklyn Community Foundation, and the City of New York.

On the operational side, we have over a dozen partnerships with food pantries, mutual aid organizations, and religious institutions, which provide food and/or funding for delivery to community members living in poverty and food insecurity. We also work with Lyft and Taskrabbit to provide cars for bulk deliveries.

Our delivery service provides two main services. First, our service helps alleviate the impossible choice between risking one’s life outside and starving for food. Our safe, simple delivery service connects engaged community volunteers with residents in need, allowing our most vulnerable to stay inside while getting their food for free. 

Secondly, we serve the deeper hunger of social isolation as a mechanism through which to bring communities closer together. Especially during this pandemic, the simple fact of knowing that someone on the other side of the door cares for your safety and well-being can be tremendously powerful. We know that isolation can be as lethal as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, and that engaged social contact reduces the risk of early death by fifty percent. Thus, we emphasize the importance of social engagement despite our strict physical distancing protocols, to help alleviate the mental and emotional pain of this pandemic.

Because we do not charge for our service, our organization has been funded entirely by the generosity of individuals and foundations who believe in our mission. After our operations close each day, I spend my evenings and nights working on grant applications and outreach to potential sponsors and partners. If we are able to successfully raise sufficient funds, we would like to invest in a full-time Director of Development to assist our fundraising efforts.

We are also exploring the possibility of restarting a subsidy program by approaching large foundations and offering to route funding directly towards groceries for the food-insecure. We would take 3% of the funding to cover administrative costs. In this way, our revenue would be tied directly to our impact, and we could put the vast majority of our funding directly into the mouths of the hungry. This program, however, requires a more sophisticated bookkeeping system, which we do not yet possess, and a demonstrated track record of accomplishment, which will require several more months of successful deliveries.

We have raised approximately $350,000 to date, mostly from individual contributors. We have also received a $50,000 grant from the Robin Hood Foundation, a $10,000 grant from the New York City Civic Impact Fund (through the NYC Mayor’s Office), and a $10,000 grant from the Brooklyn Community Foundation. We have also received $5,000 from the Ford Foundation through a matching program, $50,000 from Windham Packaging, and $10,000 from Grant Thornton.

We seek to raise additional funding to help us grow from a nascent crisis response into a sustainable nonprofit organization. For instance, while we have volunteers in our Call Center for the summer, we will eventually need to hire new operators. As we expand our service, the number of Call Center staffers must grow. This will be largely dependent on recipient demand and volunteer supply, but if we pay three Call Center staffers $15/hour we will require $8100/month to staff the Call Center, in addition to our Call Center Director. Furthermore, we need to raise money to develop our iOS/Android app to facilitate easy delivery dispatch and community-building. As previously mentioned, this will cost $75,000. We hope to raise the money as we develop the app, with our expected completion date in mid-October.

We estimate a total 2020 budget of, at minimum, $275,000 for New York operations (note that we were founded in March 2020, and are only just beginning to build out our staff, so this is not reflective of the annualized salaries we pay our employees). We require the following staffers:

A Call Center Director to recruit, train, and engage Call Center volunteers ($4,000/month); 

A Dispatch Director to facilitate the matching process between recipients and delivery volunteers ($4,000/month); 

A Community Partnerships Director to liaise with food pantries and facilitate the delivery of free food to food-insecure families ($5,000/month);

A Director of Operations to oversee the other departments and facilitate our continued expansion efforts ($8,000/month).

As mentioned, we also plan to develop an iOS app to streamline the delivery dispatch process and reduce operational costs and inefficiencies. The app will feature real-time communication among volunteers, and will allow volunteers to claim requests in their area more easily. The app, a cohesive ecosystem in which Invisible Hands volunteers can interact with one another, will also allow us to scale more rapidly and serve additional communities in need nationwide. We estimate this app will cost approximately $75,000 from ideation to completion.

Operating costs also include our Slack workspace, Call Center technology, and other associated costs.

The Elevate prize will provide Invisible Hands with the credibility and institutional support that we need to grow our organization from a successful start-up to a sustainable nonprofit organization. Funding will help us scale our efforts, develop our iOS/Android app, and conduct more targeted outreach to prospective volunteers and recipients. We also hope to connect with innovators and leaders in the volunteer and nonprofit sectors to gain a better understanding of and appreciation for volunteer engagement tactics. Finally, the institutional support and guidance will be invaluable to me as a young leader in the turbulent nonprofit space, who desperately wants to serve my community during and beyond this crisis, but needs additional support and guidance to navigate the uncertain waters of social entrepreneurship and community engagement. 

Global economic turmoil has forced most large nonprofits to constrict their services. While it may seem counterintuitive to build a new nonprofit organization from scratch, our demonstrated impact on the ground has shown the tremendous need for our service, and the incredible capacity of volunteers to serve their communities, pulling together at a time when the world is pulling us apart.

As with every nonprofit organization, we need funding to maintain our operations. Because we serve those whom the market cannot reach, we cannot raise sufficient revenue through our service alone. We rely on the generosity of donors, sponsors, and volunteers to cover our relatively lean budget. Thus, funding would be invaluable to the continued success of Invisible Hands.

Similarly, as we look to establish a sustainable organization we will need leaders in the private and public sectors to serve on our Board of Directors and as informal advisors to the organization and help oversee our 14,000+ volunteer base. Relatedly, given the people-powered nature of our organization, we will rely heavily on the Elevate Prize Foundation’s marketing support to reach new volunteers and people in need of our service.

Our biggest partnerships will be with food pantries, mutual aid networks, and religious institutions, which can provide direct and immediate relief to the hungry in our service areas. Existing partnerships include organizations like City Harvest, St. John’s Church, and ReThinkFoodNYC. These partners can either provide direct food relief, or contribute to our subsidy program, which we would then use to sponsor deliveries. 

Other potential partners include larger corporations, such as Coca Cola or Pepsi, which could provide employee volunteer-hours to complete deliveries. We would like to partner with Uber or Lyft to complete long-distance deliveries. We would like to partner with clothing and mask manufacturers (e.g. NorthFace) to sponsor custom apparel. 

As we look toward expanding our service beyond the Northeast, we will also need to build relationships with local communities and companies across the nation. These organizations will help us spread the word and provide either food or funding to support our mission.