Mama Muses with Shelly Tygielski | founder, Pandemic of Love
Image by Sun Sentinel
Pandemic of Love began as a grassroots response to COVID 19 by Shelly Tygielski on March 14, 2020. Its mission: to match people in need with donors as a mutual aid community. Mutual aid means that the money is not touched by Pandemic of Love, but rather transferred directly from the donor to the person in need. This means no red tape, no fees, a low overhead, but most importantly it maximizes the amount of aid and forges a real relationship between the donor and recipient in a safe, confidential way. Since Pandemic of Love’s inception on March 14, 2020, over $18.5 million has been donated to 132,000+ people and families in need, all made possible by 625+ volunteers working around the clock to manually match those in need with donors. The organization has spread worldwide with a presence in the US, Canada, Portugal, Spain, the UK, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Columbia, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, the Netherlands, and they are only continuing to grow and spread across the globe. Pandemic of Love has helped realize a real sense of community, giving, and connection between those who need help and those that can give it. After 20 years as an executive in corporate America, Shelly left in 2016 and fully began her journey as a trauma-informed mindfulness teacher, primarily working in communities affected by gun violence and mass shootings, with social justice organizations helping build resilience, and with vulnerable populations like refugees and immigrants. Her meditation community, called the Sand Tribe has grown to 15,000+ people since it began in 2015. With deep insight, a brilliant mind, a full heart, and seeing her community in need of help, Pandemic of Love was born and while they have already made a huge impact worldwide, it’s only just begun.
Interview by Kacy Byxbee
There is an obvious correlation here, but I am curious, how do you see Pandemic of Love intersecting with your work as a mindfulness teacher?
It’s so funny you ask this. I am a mindfulness teacher, and I teach primarily to individuals who are traumatized (refugees, survivors gun violence, and school shootings), and then I also work a lot with activists. It’s interesting because one of the core tenets and principles of everything I have written, and the classes and courses I’ve put together, is that self-care is about building a community of care. And how self-care cannot be individualistic in its pursuit. It has to be communal. We teach a lot of groups that we work with that the concept of community of care needs to become (to a degree) structured, formalized and institutionalized with a formalized coping plan. To actually see everything that we have talked about in theory, or done in smaller levels, work on a mass global scale is incredible. It is helping people with their mental health and stability, and it is helping people find it easier to do the thing that I think is the hardest thing for anyone to do, which is to ask for help.
Why do you think it's so hard for people to ask for help?
It’s the narrative that we tell ourselves. We believe that if we ask for help, regardless of what it is for, we are basically saying, “I am insufficient and incapable of doing this.” We tell ourselves different types of narratives and stories in that way. That we are incompetent, insufficient, incapable of doing something a certain way. That we are not enough in some way. It’s that type of “go getter” mentality that society has perpetuated. It is go, go, go. Look at your Instagram feed. You look at all of these entrepreneurial influencers with the “5 steps to being more this”, the “17 steps to doing that”…it’s about the hustle. When you are in that hustle mindset, it is individualistic, it’s not we built this, we did this. Instead, it is, “I did this, I got my shit together. I worked really hard. I woke up every morning.” And it’s not true. It’s even deeper than that. As a white woman who basically has the privilege of just being white in this country, the privilege of being in a middle-class home, the privilege of having no issue putting groceries in my fridge in this point, I can’t think of it like that. I had the privilege of enough time and wherewithal to be able to start thinking about others and start Pandemic of Love because my needs are taken care of.
Where does your sense of activism come from?
I’ve been an activist since I was 12, and I always credit my friend Jennifer. We were really good friends growing up in elementary school and in 7th grade, she gave me shit about using a BIC pen. She told me, “they do testing on animals, and they’re owned by Gillette, and I am boycotting them and I’m a part of PETA.” And I was like, “what’s PETA?” Within a week, she had recruited me and I became vegetarian. I was so intrigued. We would go door to door on behalf of Greenpeace to save whales and we started a recycling effort at our school in 1989 or 1990. What I was able to do in my junior high school career was really see that just one person can make a difference. I also think growing up Jewish in a small insular Jewish community, that philanthropy and this whole notion of tikkun olam, and repairing the world, is always reigning true. Always giving back, and always looking out for people that have less than you.
I can only imagine the amount of work that you're doing every day and how taxing it must be. are you ever able to restore and decompress?
It’s not 24/7. I listen to my body. When I need to sleep, I sleep. Some days I get to sleep really late, but if I need to sleep in on Saturday and sleep 12 hours, I will. I’m not a stickler for a schedule Before the pandemic, I was a morning person, in bed by 10pm max and fast asleep. And now, if I can make it out of bed before 8am, it’s a miracle. I go to bed around 1-2 in the morning because there’s so much to be done. It’s this really strange place were living in. I think it’s about listening to your body, learning to ask for help. I take some pauses during the day. I am really anchored in my daily mindfulness practice, which I’ve had for 20 years and is the backbone. It informs all the work I do, all the decisions I make, and it informed my decision to put the sheets up in the first place.
Does mindfulness for you mean meditation?
Yeah for sure. I don’t think you can live a mindful life without doing the work and having a practice. You can’t expect that all of a sudden, you can be in conversation with someone and be able to take a pause before reacting to something if you don’t actually have a steady daily practice of meditation on a regular basis.
The pause is so hard for me. I’m working on it.
The meditation is in the return and recognizing while you’re sitting, that your mind has wondered, or [in normal life recognizing] that you are interrupting, that you are reacting, or that you are not pausing. The recognition of just, “oh I didn’t pause.” Verbalizing this can be strange in a conversation, but I think it could appreciated and maybe even inspire [whomever you’re talking to] to do the same.
Do you meditate in the mornings or does it just happen whenever it can happen?
Always in the mornings. One of the teachers I teach with named davidji came up with this great acronym, RPM: rise, pee, meditate. If you don’t make it part of your morning routine, and it's non-negotiable, it falls by the wayside. I think if it’s just as common as I woke up in the morning, I washed my face, I went to the bathroom, I brushed my teeth. You would never leave the house without brushing your teeth and you shouldn’t leave the house without your practice. If it is a non-negotiable thing, that’s the best way to be able to get into the habit.
Pandemic of Love
Pandemic of Love started with a local mission to give and receive aid in a connected way, and it has grown into a massive movement. How did this growth happen so quickly?
First of all, I think it was timing. If I had waited 4 weeks to figure out what the backend was going to look like and white board it, put a team together, and done all that stuff, then I am not really sure. I think it would have gotten lost. I think the timing was really important.
I also asked for help. I reached out to a couple friends in my community that I knew had the privilege of time and the ability to be able to volunteer and help to grow the organization. Within two days of first posting the forms, I was already drowning in emails. A day and a half later, I called my friends Susan and Julia and asked them what they were doing and told them I needed help. It grew from there.
I also think that it’s such a simple concept. There's no middle-man. It such an easy and confidential way to ask for help. I think a lot of people were looking for ways that they could help directly, especially at a time where people were sheltering at home. They were unsure how to help, how to get food to somebody, how can to help someone stock up on their meds? There was no exchange for something like that. Yes, you can go to your local Red Cross, food bank, church or synagogue, but I think that they themselves were trying to figure out how to get people help if they cannot leave the house. How do you get someone a meal, pick stuff up, how do you protect your volunteers? This is a very simple answer to a lot of people’s problems, which are mostly monetary.
It’s genius. It’s a massive aid organization with no red tape.
Zero. It’s a total disruption for 501-c3s, actually. Some non-profits are really efficient. They have ratings, they can tell you what percent on the dollar goes to administration and overhead, but the bigger a non-profit gets, the more overhead they have. If you look at post hurricane [relief], for example, the Red Cross had so much criticism for how they have handled Haiti, the Bahamas and Puerto Rico, for a number of reasons and there are people in the pan handle hit by hurricane Russell that are still looking for help because there is so much bureaucracy. You look at that and think, “wow that’s not that much,” so why do we keep doing that? Why do we give in that way?
It's such a genius idea, but at the same time I am thinking, how has this not existed before now? It is so simple, and it makes so much sense.
It does. I didn’t invent mutual aid communities. It’s a pillar of trauma informed mindfulness, social justice organizations, and organizations that are doing the work in their grassroots communities. Community organizers have been using this model for a very long time, but it has been informal. The only difference is that Pandemic of Love formalizes that, and just names it for what it is and puts structure to it. We know it works locally, therefore it should work nationally and globally as well.
Can you tell me just a little bit more about the basic structure of how getting help works for someone who's in need and then how giving help works for someone who wants to donate and be a patron?
You go to our homepage. If you are in the US, Canada, or anywhere but Latin America. You can go to your local community tab and see if your country or city are there. It’s listed by state first in the US, and then the country at the bottom. If your community isn’t there, and someone hasn’t stepped up to form a micro-community in your area, it doesn’t mean we can’t help. It just means we are going to service you in the national forms so you may get matched with someone a few states away instead of in your local area. You may not get matched locally but we can still help.
You fill out the forms. It’s five or six very straight forward questions. It just asks you who you are, what your occupation is or was, where you live, your zip code, how we can contact you, and what you need help with (the bills you need help paying, enumerate for us what specific amount you need help with, etc). Then you just hit SUBMIT and you go into the queue. Our queue recognizes your zip code and if there is are in a micro community in your area, it will identify your zip code and drop you into the [respective] micro-community request sheet. Then, that micro-community will match you directly with someone who is the same city as you.
For the donors, it is the same way. You can choose to donate locally, in a specific place, or you can choose to help anyone anywhere. You fill out a simple form, indicate if you want to give once, multiple times, if you prefer to help multiple families, and how much you are willing to give per transaction. You can give anything. If you can only give $5, we suggest you join up with a group, aggregate your funds, and donate as a group. A lot of scout groups and troops have done this. We recommend $50 as a minimum give. It can be a contribution of 10 people that have gotten together to get there, or just one person.
We have over 600 volunteers now working around the clock all over the world to match people together. They manually, one by one, go through the forms for the people in need. They go in order of when the form was received so there is no preferential treatment. It’s first come, first serve. We go though, read the form, see what they need, figure out the average amount they need to get them to a better place where they can pay a phone bill, keep their lights on, and put food in their fridge, etc. And then we look through the donor forms and find someone that matches what they are in need of and we connect them by email.
The email isn’t too detailed, it is basically, “Jane meet Joe. Jane is a 29-year-old single mother from Michigan who worked in the restaurant industry and lost her job.” That is pretty much the extent of what we give. We don’t say where the person worked or what city they live in. We say, “Joe has indicated that he may be able to help with some of your needs.” We don’t indicate how much because sometimes people say they are willing to give “x,” and then they talk to the person and connect, and they actually end up doing a lot more or helping them in other ways. If both the donor and recipient have provided their numbers, we exchange the phone numbers, but it is optional for the donor to give their number. [After the initial introduction,] we step out of the way.
How long does it take to be matched?
At the beginning, we could match within 24 hours, then it went to 48, and now it can take up to seven days, depending on which community. In some communities, it is still 24 hours, but the national average is 5-7 days just because of the sheer volume. Yesterday, we got 8,000 new requests for help in 12 hours after the CNN article ran. I know it is not as quick as some people need to get help, especially in states where evictions are starting to happen. Usually those people, as a last ditch, hail Mary attempt, will hit the contact us form and send us an email saying, “I filled out my form and I am being evicted tomorrow. I need to figure something out, can you help?” We try to get to those emails as well every day and clear out the inbox, but it is getting harder.
Is there any sort of vetting process that goes on with the requests that come in from people need?
Yes, if someone is getting matched with a donor that's giving them $100 or less, the vetting we do is simple. We google a person's name and confirm where they say they are from and/or that their [social media] profile is a match. If we can’t find them, then we will shoot them an email. Also, we always tell the donor, you are going to be in contact with this person, so if you want to vet them, call them up and talk to them. If you don’t have a good feeling, you can always ask to be rematched. We tell people, go with your gut. If you’re donating between $100-$250, we go a step further and we will check in with the person that is in need and have more of a conversation with them. If you are giving more than $250 (people have given up to $5,000), then we literally ask for everything [to substantiate the request].
If you are the donor, you don’t have to give cash. You don’t have to Venmo or use a cash app. You can buy a gift card to the supermarket, that is closest to them. If they’re a mother that really needs diapers, you can send the diapers directly to their house if you want to. If they need their phone bill paid, you can pay it directly to their provider. If someone needs their rent paid, donors will pay the landlord directly. They don’t transfer the money and then hope the person is going to pay it. They ask for the landlord’s number, find out exactly how much and sometimes the donor is even able to negotiate down the rent owed, and that’s even better.
Photo by Stephanie Diani for Mindful Magazine
How do you manage all the recruitment and training of your volunteers?
You can’t randomly email and ask to volunteer because our volunteers have access to a lot of data and personal, confidential information that we are concerned about. We make our volunteers all sign a waiver and non-disclosure agreements, and they have to be referred from someone else who is a volunteer. Someone else has to vouch for them. If you want to start a micro community, we need you to gather 5 volunteers/friends who are willing to be trained at the same time. Then, I have a zoom call with that person, vet them and get to know them before they get the micro community started.
Do you have help managing all your volunteers?
I have two amazing individuals named Dominic and Daniella. Daniella is from Portugal and Dominic is from Spain. They started funded Pandemia de Amor in week one and they now take care of our entire Latin American division, so anyone that speaks Spanish or Portuguese, (including Spain and Portugal even though they aren’t in Latin America) are all managed by them. Today, we just launched Pandemic of Love UK. What I am focusing on is growing, training, and being really present and involved with our US team, and then on-boarding new countries, helping them get started with the training wheels, and letting them fly and determine what is the most culturally appropriate and effective in their countries.
Outside of Canada, Portugal, Spain, the UK, and the United States. What other countries are you guys in right now?
We’re in Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Columbia, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, launching in the Netherlands.
Are you ever able to take a step back from it and marvel at what you’ve accomplished?
I think one day I will be. Right now, I am riding the wave and I can’t figure out if the wave is bringing me to the shore or taking me further out. I am just enjoying being on it at this point. There are a lot of things that are happening. I am not focusing on marveling on this creation, I am more focused on thinking, How do we reach as many people as we can?, How do we build more efficient structures (this is where my 20 years in the corporate world kicks in)?, How do we make this something that is sustainable for long after this pandemic ends?, How do we create new ways of being and supporting each other in the world?
What has been one of the most moving stories form the last 8 weeks for you?
I think [this type of giving] has renewed a lot of people’s relationship with charity and what it feels like. In many ways, [it feels like it has] restored people’s faith in humanity, on both sides, which is really incredible because giving can be a really wonderful relationship.
One really amazing story is about an undocumented child. We have a lot of undocumented people because they can’t apply for help from anywhere else. There is bureaucracy, red tape, and a fear of giving their information because of what may be done with it. We have found that when one person takes that leap of faith [in a community], we will get a lot of requests from that same area because they have seen it work and be safe.
We had a 16-year-old dreamer who filled out the form for her parents and said I am writing you on behalf of my mom, she doesn’t even know I am writing, but my father passed away from COVID and we can’t claim my dad’s remains or give him a proper burial or funeral because we can’t afford it and we don’t qualify for any federal help.
There’s a program in New York state where, if you can’t afford [to bury or cremate your loved one] because you make below x amount of dollars, the funeral parlor or crematorium, gets a subsidy directly from NY state. But if you are undocumented, you can’t prove what you actually make financially, so that funeral home can’t get that subsidy. And if you can’t come up with the money, (a couple thousand dollars at least for something modest) then you can’t afford to bury your loved which means you can’t reclaim their body. This was obviously causing a lot of stress in her family. Her parents had been married for over 30 years and the whole family was really distraught.
Our team found her form, vetted her, spoke to the funeral home director, negotiated down the price, and then turned to us at national and said, “we don’t have enough resources to do this with our donors in our community here,” we said, “no problem we have one.” We told our donor what was going on, they said they would absolutely like to help and called the funeral home, paid for the costs, and the next day we got this letter from the daughter and it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read. It was basically a eulogy to her dad. She wanted us to know who her dad was, and she wanted us to understand how much this meant to her family and her mother. She explained that for obvious reasons this was one of the worst experiences of her life because she lost her dad, but that this experience also gave her so much hope for the future of this world. We get stories like this all the time. I could write a whole book on these stories because we hear them all the time.
I can see why you keep going. Where would you like to see Pandemic of Love go? What does the future hold?
If I am going to be a dreamer now myself and think big, and have a big hairy audacious goal, my goal would be for there to be a formalized, maybe even institutionalized (meaning the government somehow sees the value in this and gets involved) structure in every community around the country and around the world. Where, just like there’s a city hall in every city, there’s a mutual aid in every city. For it to be a standard way of being a community. That to me, would be a really beautiful thing.