Zoomers Helping Boomers

In the midst of a global crisis, the pandemic and forced quarantine for Americans is causing strife among everyone. The ones that are getting hit the hardest? The elderly and immunocompromised. To stop the curve of the virus, people are encouraged to self-isolate. However, this serves as a major problem, as many people still have to venture out of their houses to buy groceries. To combat both the spread of the virus and to help the elderly who are at a higher level of risk, Daniel Goldberg, a 17-year-old junior at San Marcos High School, created an organization called Zoomerstoboomers. After schools got shut down and a national state of emergency was declared, students and parents alike were forced into quarantine. All of a sudden, sports and all after school extracurricular activities were cancelled. Danny’s dad, an ER doctor at Cottage Hospital, was rushing out to help people every day.

“He’s putting himself out on the front lines saving people while my siblings and I were sitting on the couch doing nothing,” said Danny.

People over 60 and people with preexisting medical conditions that would make them more predisposed to the virus should not be leaving their house because of how dangerous the virus is. “So that’s when I realized, I’m seventeen, I’m at a level of risk as well but it’s nowhere near comparable to the elderly and immunocompromised.” Danny began developing a website with the idea to create a service that brings groceries to people in need at no extra cost so that things can be as normal as possible.

Danny first started advertising through a post on Nextdoor. Nextdoor, at its simplest form, is an app for neighbors to communicate and report on what is going on in the community. Just from that one post, Danny instantly got a few orders. His service started to grow once the media caught on, and since then, orders have grown exponentially. He made calls to people he knew and created a set of safety procedures (which can be found on his website) to keep everyone involved from incurring extra risk and to protect them from getting sick. One of their procedures includes wearing gloves at all times no matter what they are doing and not touching their face. They wear masks at all times and minimize contact as best as possible.

Originally, when the service was newly launched, almost every order went to Danny, which created a backlog. To solve this problem, Danny created a large group chat with his team. He created Google Sheets with all the orders and had volunteers fill out their names next to orders they were going to take. He found someone to work as head staff and to delegate deliveries. Right after he started the service, he received an email from Gladden and Sons, which is a produce store located on Hollister. Gladden and Sons helped to streamline the process by dropping off boxes right outside the store, which eliminated the shopping portion of their jobs and made it more efficient. One of the main problems Danny encountered was the ratio of drivers to orders. Between the first two days they were getting around 10-20 orders and then it started to grow from 30 to 60, and then the orders took off exponentially. As of right now, Zoomerstoboomers.com delivers in many locations including Santa Barbara, Denver, Miami, Greenwich, Honolulu, Salt Lake City, Morris County, Cambridge, Los Angeles, and Malibu, with more to come. Interested customers can place orders once a week through their website at Zoomerstoboomers.com. Our community is so grateful and appreciative of the efforts from all the volunteers at Zoomerstoboomers.com