Susan Arnold, a 58-year-old Uber driver in Chicago, first became acquainted with GoFundMe last year, when she helped a friend get the word out about his campaign. As with many posts on the crowdfunding website, he was appealing for donations to help with a medical issue exacerbated by external forces: The friend lived in a car and had been diagnosed with macular degeneration. Unable to find work, he was going blind.\n
has thrown into sharp relief the role one company plays in reinforcing a social safety net that’s been fraying for some time. For many, like the Arnolds, a makeshift survival method has become the only dependable option to pursue.As a doctor’s visit is inextricably linked to the bills that follow it, the global covid-19 emergency is a crisis of basic material survival as much as of public health.
An Uber driver in Tennessee is asking for donations of as little as $1.00 to help him buy food for himself and his dog. A Washington, D.C. resident is trying to raise money to pay off medical school loans for the overworked professionals on the front lines of the crisis. Hundreds of bars and restaurants are asking former patrons to pay server salaries while they wait out the lockdown.
As U.S. states, abandoned by the federal government, struggle to secure masks and gloves for their essential workers, we found $13.7 million has been raised on GoFundMe by average people worldwide hoping to lend their dollars to the sourcing or manufacturing of face masks and PPE.
Susan Arnold’s husband John, who also until recently drove for Uber, slides his face mask to the side so he can speak into the phone’s receiver. “If you’re going to the hospital with cancer, is it a medical crisis, or a financial crisis? It’s both,” he says. He conceptualizes the pandemic and its fallout the same way, though the scale of this disaster, he says, as he lists every crisis of his lifetime from the Cuban missile crisis to the stock market crash, “is a million times worse.
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