A Response Among the Turmoil - The Virtual Crisis Response Task Force

Written by Jess Jones

It seems strange when I think back just a few months ago.  I was talking with a friend and had planned a visit but she had to reschedule.  It didn't seem like a big deal as we would see each other in a month.  There was a story on the news about a virus that was just about to hit the United States. I took little notice.  Then a veil came down.  Now our lives are defined by cancelled visits, masks, and this thing called social distancing.  Schools closed, businesses going belly up, and unemployment rises. 

We all struggle to find some response to this pandemic (odd how putting a word to it does nothing to limit how much dread it creates in us) some way of feeling like we still have some control of our lives and not give in to a sense of being overwhelmed.  Numbers.  Numbers have taken on a new sense of urgency in our lives.  Daily the news creates for us a running tally of infections and those who have died.  As this story is being written the news recounts the number of over 100,000 have passed in the United States.  For some reason the impact stymies my sense of resolve.  

I first met Jedediah Logan(founder of the Virtual Crisis Response Task Force) with his work on the Board of Education for the Intuitive School of Magick where he spends his time in assisting in the creation of curriculum and overseeing the running of the online school.   You get an immediate sense of a person with an engaging mind which is coupled with the sense of a general state of careful, considered expression.  At a time when the community is in a state of isolation, both physical and mental, and many are simply struggling to keep the details of their personal situation from collapsing around them Jedediah turns his thought on how to assist those around him and how to best give answer to this wave hitting the community.

In the face of community crisis Jedediah Logan saw a way that he could gather together the tools available and worked to establish the Virtual Crisis Response Task Force.  " So the big thing I wanted to keep in mind with the VCRTF is that we didn't want to get in the way. There's traditional services out there, and traditional crisis response, and it would be really easy to make matters worse by just showing up and stepping on their toes. We wanted to occupy the space of most need and to conduct work that wasn't already covered. "    In other words, there were already a growing number of support groups, resource hubs, and basic outreach forums.  "So it's the same with the peer support. We didn't want the group to be a peer support group directly, because that's the job being done, very effectively, by all the other facebook groups. I didn't want to make a new space that everyone needed to show up to. There's a myriad of other groups already out there that focus on peer support that hundreds of thousands of people are signed up to already. There was no reason to reinvent the wheel."

"So what we wanted to do was to be a place where admins of these existing groups can go to find resources to help their group when someone comes to them facing a death.  So our role is strictly psycho-education."  In many ways one could think of the VCRTF as a clearinghouse of information.   "I figured that we had one spear to throw at this problem, and we had to make it count. There was no way that we could train a massive fleet of peer support personnel, and it would be really unruly to make another space for people to gather in. So instead we just want to make sure that the places that already exist are well armed."

Dr. Jedediah Logan is Founder and Chief Community Officer of Brainbase, an online innovation center helping people learn new technologies, teaches Symbols and Visual Literacy at Indiana University South Bend.  Graduated Fielding Graduate University with a PhD in Media Psychology.

To connect with the Virtual Crisis Response Task Force

https://www.facebook.com/groups/virtualcrisisresponse/?ref=group_header