WAYMAKER, a need-and-help matching platform, has seen residents of affluent neighbourhoods ask for aid, its co-founder Arun Kumar Ramasamy said.

Many people need help but do not put up a white flag outside their homes or on social media for reputation and privacy reasons, the social worker with an engineering background told The Malaysian Insight.

Arun was referring to the new white flag movement that was birthed on social media amid widespread job losses due to the Covid pandemic. People in need of assistance are encouraged to fly a white flag outside their homes where passers-by can see it and come to their aid if they have the means to do so.

Arun said he had received unique requests for help during the pandemic that are not your usual appeals for food and cash aid, he added. These could be calls for help with education and religious needs, he said.

“We built Waymaker for people, including those outside of B40 communitiies, who may find it hard to raise the flag, nor would they ask for help through social media,” the 33-year-old Arun said.

Arun said a giver on Waymaker had once handed groceries to someone who lived in a nice neighbourhood with big houses and expensive cars parked on the driveways. The receiver had been on the verge of bankruptcy.

The platform had also recently received a help request from a man in his early 20s who had lost both his parents within a space of 16 days to Covid-19.

“He had no clue about burial arrangements and expenses and reached out for help. I posted his request on his behalf on Waymaker. 

“Five responses came in support of this very unique and specific need. The family is not poor, but he was alone and he didn’t know what to do. 

“It was the kind of need for which a person wouldn’t raise a white flag because it’s burial-related,” Arun said. 

Different

Arun and co-founder Richard Easupatham had worked on the peer-to-peer platform since March last year.

It went live in October 2020 and was officially launched on February 14.

“The Waymaker platform provides some form of anonymity because when you create a request, you can choose who receives it. For example, a request from a male can be blasted out to other men only.

“So you have some degree of control in terms of who sees your needs. And when someone responds to you, you get the message in your inbox,” said Arun.

For people in search of help, Waymaker offers more categories than “Meals & Groceries”. People can also ask for help in “IT & Technology”, “Pets”, “Education”, “Religious needs” or select “Other” if their request does not fit any of those categories.

A requester can also select the type of person they prefer to receive help from by stating which gender, spoken language, ethnicity and age group.

Arun said the idea was to bridge the gaps that are sometimes caused when the help given is “generalised”, such as generic food aid that larger charity organisations tend to give recipients.

“For example, when an organisation arranges charity for the poor, it receives many bags of rice and sardine cans. We tend to assume that’s what people need. 

“And the receiver doesn’t have a choice, but with Waymaker, they can have some level of control on what they need,” he said. 

Arun calls this “contextual needs” that are unique to the recipient’s request.

“(Bigger) organisations can (give general aid) on a macro-level, but at the micro-level, people can help one another (with more specific needs),” he said.

Arun added that Waymaker is an organised way of keeping track of responses to aid requests, which for a person seeking help, is more organised and direct compared to using social networks such as Instagram or Facebook.

And for those wanting to give help, they can use Waymaker to post someone else’s request. This helps to deal with “donor fatigue” especially if the same pool of people giving help have been doing so repeatedly.

“We built Waymaker in a way that you are not limited in your circle of influence. 

“You can get help from people beyond your circle of influence, you can post requests here and someone in Perlis can respond,” Arun said.

Waymaker has 900 users nationwide and has logged 379 requests, of which 316 have been closed after being attended to.

“And there were 627 responses to the more than 300 requests,” Arun said. 

Besides Arun and Richard, seven other volunteers are with the Waymaker team to sustain and work on improving the platform.  – August 1, 2021.