Tower and Town, April 2021

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LINK under Lockdown

The Marlborough and District LINK Scheme has continued to operate throughout these past tumultuous months. Changes there have been, of course, but imagination and verve have meant that we have been able to serve the Marlborough community better than we thought was possible.

To begin with, all volunteer drivers in the age ranges deemed most vulnerable to the virus stepped back and were ‘rested’. Younger drivers carried on and new ones stepped in gallantly. Of course, there were far fewer trips to the surgery and the hospital, but there was a great deal of shopping needed by folk sheltering and housebound.

The question of paying for the shopping was quickly solved with the purchase of a number of iZettle card-readers. The LINK volunteer would receive a shopping list - perhaps several shopping lists - from a coordinator. With Waitrose duly warned of the LINK operation, the volunteer would steam round the aisles, piling their trolley with goodies, and check out using their own credit card.

Next stop: the client’s front door. Out with the mobile phone and the card-reader; the card-reader connects via Bluetooth to the mobile, then a wave of the client’s credit card and the appropriate payment wings its way to the LINK bank account. Back home again, the volunteer logs the Waitrose bill as an expense on the LINK computer system and they are electronically reimbursed by LINK for their Waitrose payments.

With access to and use of ready cash increasingly problematic, this fully audit-able system quickly gained the confidence of both clients and volunteers, even though in some locations the transaction had to be done by walking out to the front gate in order to get a decent mobile phone signal. Three cheers for technology!

Hugh de Saram