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By Joyce Westner Dec. 9, 2023
When Lara Pienaar, a decade long-resident of Winchester in the Muraco school district, was looking for help raking leaves, she needed help raking leaves but she didn’t know how to hire someone. “I put an ad on Craigslist,” she said. “But I got so many responses, it was overwhelming.”
Realizing that so many people needed the same sort of thing, she decided to create a website that would help local residents find workers, while also helping workers find customers. https://www.truelocalheroes.com/ was born, and for a fee residents can sign up as “Neighbors,” but workers can sign up for free as “Heroes.”
Pienaar is working on an app, and she’s also hoping to launch it in other communities. A former organizational psychologist, she started working on the website just before Covid, while she was staying with her mother in Cape Town, South Africa. She needed to make sure that it would be safe for kids to sign up as heroes, if they want baby-sitting jobs, or if they want to earn money raking leaves, so she requires anyone joining to upload a photo and verify their identity.
