Facebook back in November announced a new Community Help feature that lets people ask for or offer things like shelter, food, and supplies in the event of a natural disaster, and now the tool is finally making its debut.
In a Wednesday blog post, Facebook's VP of Social Good Naomi Gleit offered up more details about the feature, which is available starting today for natural disasters and "accidental incidents," like building fires in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Saudi Arabia. During the initial rollout, Facebook hopes to gather information about how people use it.
The feature will let you offer help to those around you, or find it if you're in need. People can use Community Help to offer or find things like food and water, transportation, baby items, shelter, equipment and supplies, clothing and toiletries, animal supplies, or other essentials. Posts can be viewed by category or location.
Going forward, Facebook "will look to improve [Community Help] and make it available for all countries and additional types of incidents," Gleit wrote.
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Community Help is an update to Safety Check, a feature Facebook introduced in 2014 to let people mark themselves as okay during a crisis. To use Community Help after an incident, Safety Check must first be activated.
Safety Check only activates when two things have happened: global crisis reporting agencies have alerted Facebook about an incident, and when a lot of people on the social network start talking about it. If these two things happen, people may be prompted to mark themselves as safe and invite others to do the same. Now, if the incident is a natural or accidental disaster, people will also see Community Help.
Facebook said that since its launch in 2014, Safety Check has been activated "hundreds of times."
In times of crisis, this could prove useful.
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