On 5th March we held what would turn out to be our last intergenerational workshop for many months, celebrating World Book day with children and residents at Pennethorne House.
A month later, we launched our new programme, InCommon Buddies, after a busy few weeks of reimagining how we could facilitate meaningful intergenerational connections remotely. Buddies matches families and older volunteers on our programmes for a chance to spend joyful time together over the phone and video calls.
As we approach 3 months of InCommon Buddies at the start of July, it feels like a good time to reflect on what’s been happening.
We were nervous for our first few calls, wondering how our activities would work and whether conversations would flow online. Very soon though we were watching relationships develop and looking forward to seeing familiar faces each week. Now we’ve set up and facilitated over 90 Buddies calls, and have more than 50 individuals of all ages taking part regularly. Some highlights have included learning morse code, musical quizzes, designing our own games and most recently writing stories together.
We’ve created 9 Buddies activities packs to help others keep in touch with older friends and family.
We knew we’d be limited in how many people we could work with directly, so we wanted to share our activities and ideas to help families and friends keep relationships between young and old alive during lockdown. It’s been great to see those resources being widely shared, and to hear stories of people using them with neighbours and grandparents.
Right from the start, we’ve believed it’s important to maintain and even grow intergenerational relationships during this crisis, and that hasn’t changed.
On June 15th we launched a report with Clarion Housing on sustaining intergenerational connection at a time of crisis and are keen to continue this conversation within communities and the Housing sector more widely. Sadly, it doesn’t look like it will be safe to restart our workshops for several months and as the summer goes on we’ll be shaping and sharing our plans for continuing to bring generations together this coming year.
We’d like to thank our partners, facilitators and friends for their ongoing support, and most of all our fantastic Buddies, aged 7 to 89.
It’s not going to be a straightforward time for anyone, but in the stoical words of one of our older volunteers: ‘we just have to get on with life as best we can really, don’t we!’