One of the pleasures of my role as Good Practice Mentor is being able to link people to information and expertise to help them do their own jobs well; and that’s not just information and expertise from Leeds. Time to Shine was one of 14 areas of England taking part in the Ageing Better programme, from Torbay (who learned a lot about ABCD projects) to Middlesbrough (who addressed older people’s mental health issues). It was fascinating to discover what worked for each project.
Ageing Better in Camden decided that as there was already quite a lot of activity for older people in their borough, they could play a valuable role in taking a proactive approach to finding older people and helping them to engage with some of this activity.
Throughout the seven-year programme they undertook street outreach, worked directly to engage people in social housing and thought carefully about how their communications helped people to engage or put up barriers. Much of this learning is available in some excellent toolkits on their website but, even better than that, Joanne Stapleton (their Good Practice Mentor) is going to run three one-hour long sessions for us.
The interactive workshops will be online, to make them easily available to anyone who would like to find out more about street outreach, using ‘pop-ups’ in neutral spaces, and looking at barriers to effective comms. You can come to just one, two, or all three workshops. They will be of interest both to managers running services and keen to reach everyone, and also to front line practitioners who need more tools and information on different ways of doing things to support them as they try to engage older people.
Book your places here:
- Understanding and addressing barriers to participation through comms – 20 September
- Hosting informal pop-up events in neutral spaces as a stepping stone – 27 September
- Identifying and responding to isolation during day-to-day interactions – 4 October
Jessica Duffy
Good Practice Mentor