Showing & Telling: Partnership Working in Film
Alleviating Isolation and Loneliness in Retirement Housing Before, During and Living with Covid-19.
N.B. Images not showing social distancing were taken pre-Covid-19. Any views expressed here are my own and not that of partner organisations or my employer.
My role as Anchor Hanover’s Wellbeing Development Manager for East London is to find solutions that will reduce isolation and loneliness for our over 55s community.
It’s true that people are happy in their homes and the majority are doing okay and can access extra services as and when they need for themselves, just as it should be; the good things about retirement housing, as highlighted in this recent Anchor Hanover Social Value Report, can sometimes be forgotten.
As complex needs rise and people live longer with those needs it’s necessary more than ever to provide solutions that help people age well which are ‘comprehensive, adaptable and compassionate’, as a member of Leeds Older Peoples Forum writes in this blog for Housing LIN reflecting an experience many will recognise. Anchor Hanover were brave enough to admit this problem and created this role as one of the ways to look for solutions.
But there has been some backlash I notice about so many of us using the word ‘vulnerable’ when talking about later life people during the pandemic. How do we find solutions if we don’t acknowledge that there are a significant number of people for whom without proper support are completely vulnerable to abuses and self-neglect including not only isolation and loneliness but malnutrition and mental health decline, physical deterioration, financial abuse and other less talked about situations that can occur like cuckooing? It doesn’t mean all people are vulnerable in later life, but quite often some have had a significant life changing event that has prompted the move to us which can leave them open to these vulnerabilities.
Filling the gap in social care; retirement housing providers as facilitators
Luckily for housing providers, many of the solutions to isolation and loneliness are already there. In the cataclysmic, human-shaped gap that exists in social care, caused by long-term funding cuts, amazing initiatives have mushroomed to fill it. We need to be the facilitator between the delivery organisations and our residents. This has been the weak link in the chain.
Bringing the outside in; changing the culture
In common with many social housing providers, we have big and frequently empty lounges and beautiful gardens. Long gone are the days of friendly wardens who round people up for afternoon tea or take everyone to the seaside; estate managers are building managers, often for more than one site and have a wide range of admin and building safety to deal with.
At the same time, organisations offering health and wellbeing services often pay for space in the community to run activities and whilst many people do manage to get there, if you want to get to the truly isolated you have to meet them where they are. As we are the landlady, we have the benefit of knowing where they live! It seemed obvious to invite the organisations in to do what they are best placed to do; after all they are the experts.
The first to take up the invitation was Compassionate Neighbours, one of our most successful partnerships. Sometimes a service needs a bit of a re-design to fit what we need and it’s fun and interesting to work out what that is with residents and organisations. Compassionate Neighbours are a social movement borne out of St. Josephs Hospice. Not everyone matched their criteria for 1–1 support. They normally hold a coffee morning too at the hospice but not everyone could get there so we worked together with them and the residents to create Social Hubs in the communal lounges on our estates.
Their presence opens up the estates to a local community of ‘neighbours’ who become a kind and friendly presence and together with residents they decide what happens, whether it’s gardening, art or a chat with tea and toast. Utilising the group to introduce another group/service, if it’s something they would all like to join in with, means other projects happen within that group, like a 10 week theatre project with Immediate Theatre or a workshop by NHS Talk Changes. It creates a buzz on the estates and as new people view properties and move in, they already feel the friendliness of the community they will join.
Evaluating; using film for Showing & Telling
I wanted to track some of what was happening as it was taking off so quickly, such was the enthusiasm from organisations and the appetite of residents. It felt difficult to ‘prove’ the value of delivering all these wellbeing initiatives when trying so many different things, with no budget, all at the same time in the space of a year (the original time allocated for this pilot role in 2018.) Everyone in the different organisations I spoke to found that whichever measurement tool they used didn’t quite tell them what they needed.
In order to capture some of what was happening I spoke to Fiona Whitty and Jenny Gordon from Whitty Gordon Projects. They had already made this moving film Voices in Time with young teenagers and older people in conversation about loneliness, as part of a project they were doing on an estate. I asked them if they would do some more intergenerational work with us as well as film the progress of our wellbeing activities and partnerships in order to share the learning. We called the project Showing & Telling because we wanted others to ‘see’ the work and to let participants tell their side in a more spontaneous way.
We applied to The Mercers Company and thanks to them we have made a series of films to track the progress of the projects. This lovely four-minute film about our Compassionate Neighbours Partnership shows the impact the neighbours have at a hub as well as with their 1–1 matches and of course the benefit to themselves.
Door-knocking & wellbeing days; talk, trust and tea
We do need to get people in the room though otherwise it’s not worth organisations spending their budget with us as it will be better spent elsewhere where they can meet their funding criteria. Anyone working in this area will tell you that engagement is the hardest part of the job. Once you have people in the room you can begin the work of co-production (also known as having a chat and listening to the residents!)
Surveys have a place but in cases where people have often moved in to our housing at a point of crisis, a stroke, an amputation, maybe a bereavement, along with some who won’t tell you they never learned to read or write, surveys can be cold (if you even get any back) until you’ve built some trust. They won’t always tell you what you need to know when you are thinking about group activities and as a landlord health data is limited. Harder still to encourage people who have long ago given up on breaking through the cliques that can exist and it’s rare that anyone will take notice of a flyer that comes through the door
Any of us at any age can find it hard to leave the comfort and routine of regular TV. Even offering music, art, exercise or mental health services, a reading or music group, whatever it is, we will always get plenty of no thank yous and other less polite sentiments on the doorstep! What we are offering is not for everyone, some people are working, have families they can rely on, are able and active in their communities but we are aiming at those who don’t have that support and connection.
Engagement via door-knocking (reach, understand, support) is not easy. It’s time-consuming but it’s necessary and it’s rewarding. It gets to the most isolated so you can have a conversation. We run Wellbeing Days to break the ice where, with partners, we offer taster sessions including massage, exercise, mental health and theatre workshops as well as a chat and a cup of tea and they may agree to pop in ‘just to see’.
It’s lovely when something has sparked an interest with a person when they didn’t know it existed or were too shy to try before or else hadn’t quite understood what was on offer from a leaflet. People get to sign up to a local service such as Hoxton Health, MRS Independent Living or East London Cares with the person from that organisation that they meet in the room. And then we can start a further conversation to find out what might work well as a regular event on that estate.
For some of the most isolated, it can take weeks of door-knocking and kindness at the start a new initiative to gain a little trust to get someone ‘just to see’. Once there they will stay and come back next week because they’ve had a nice time. Time well spent at the door.
Wellbeing Days always end up like a great social event thanks to the partners who also get an opportunity to network with their peer organisations. See this short clip of Chair Disco funded by the Wick Award at a wellbeing day.
Funding or not; finding a way
Often, organisations who offer health and wellbeing activities are already funded either by charitable grants or sometimes they can be statutory services like The Stroke Project. Commissioned by City & Hackney CCG and run by Shoreditch Trust they come onsite weekly to deliver the service. This not only makes it more accessible for residents who have trouble getting there but they can bring their other clients who often live alone from the wider community too. This makes best use of our assets with an added bonus that everyone can make new friends. The group went to the cinema early in the year with Hackney Community Transports GOAL project. When the virus allows, we will be rolling this out to other estates.
Shoreditch Trust also run Community Connections, a social prescribing service that doesn’t need a GP referral and they will visit people over 50 in their homes. Their award winning team have continued during the pandemic to take referrals and offer support via phone or zoom as well as delivering cooked food to our residents.
The Mental Health Foundation were introduced to us in 2018 via their Standing Together Toolkit which we ran in Newham for eighteen weeks. Subtle and powerful, this program creates a safe space to build kinder relationships enabling people to find their similarities rather than their differences.
In the year and a half since, up to lockdown, the residents at an Extra Care estate who took part have continued to come together in the lounge and are now a cohesive community meeting regularly, door-knocking those who forget and organising birthday parties for each other. Those who need it are assisted to attend by the support worker who is part of the commissioned care. The estate manager says it has completely changed the culture on the estate where there were issues of loneliness, isolation, fear and misunderstandings about cultures and disabilities.
Following that, MHF re-designed the program to incorporate more art and here’s a glimpse of the Creating Communities MHF programme. These facilitated discussion and art groups are running across three Hackney estates funded for two years thanks again to The Mercers Company . We should have this programme across all retirement housing providing a way to prevent ill health and build community resilience and cohesion. This new British Psychological Society report shows that programmes like this and Compassionate Neighbours are what keep people well.
When there’s no money but a will to make things happen and a staff member or two (Hackney Council’s adult social care welfare & activity officers agreed to help with this one on Extra Care sites) we can make lovely things happen. In partnership with Hackney Education we have fun visits from nurseries. We grew the project with the support of staff I was able to hire as a result of securing the Connect Hackney Ageing Better research fund.
Activities with young children help lift everyone’s mood. For residents whose families live far away or those who have no family it’s a must and as is well known it can have a profound physical and mental health improvement on those living with dementia. It helps the children with language and social skills making the intergenerational mix good for all. The council have incorporated this partnership into their draft Ageing Well Strategy.
Residents taking the lead
Irma leads children from a local nursery with Zumba in an Extra Care lounge
Mavis used to be a nursery nurse and gets a chance to teach small children again
Neil teaches the children (whose inner city nursery has no garden of its own) how to plant seeds and they come back week by week and check on the progress. They grew potatoes and cooked them for lunch!
Covid-19 Isolation; keeping the links and new partnerships
It was devastating in March to stop, overnight, all these activities. Having called the Connect Hackney project Bringing the Outside In, we could now no longer bring anyone in. Estates were locked down to prevent the spread of the virus and our only option was to take to the phones to make sure everyone was supported as did all the partners who continued to support our residents. But they also turned around whatever they were doing into frontline services in double quick time; food, zoom calls, activity packs for those who wanted it.
As well as organisations like Shoreditch Trust, East London Cares and Made in Hackney who delivered food, the nursery managers who had by now built strong relationships with residents generously arranged cooked meals. One cooked a three course feast a couple of times herself and in mask and gloves brought it over; another made sure everyone who needed it got cooked food every day from The North London Muslim Community Centre for a few weeks and they sent cards from the children.
Across the country, Anchor Hanover, like other housing associations turned quickly to provide a brilliant outgoing call service for those identified as having no other support. Estate managers and back office staff called people regularly and sent out tablets for those who wanted them. And, of course, many were referred to the amazing services run by the councils in partnership with voluntary services to deliver food and medications.
Thanks to the dedication of these staff and organisations, most people seem to have come through it well, although some have lost confidence and muscle strength. Some say they are anxious and weren’t before: shop opening hours have changed; people wear masks or don’t; there are queues. People who were shielding did not get used to this months ago like the rest of us, they have come out into a strange world. At the extreme end, some are in wheelchairs who previously weren’t, some need walking aids. Others feel nervous, like they might fall, they have missed going to their exercise classes in the community or on estates which are still closed to outside organisations.
In response, we have started a new project with the Volunteer Centre Hackney (VCH) who are recruiting volunteers to accompany people out to navigate this new world disorder. Some of the previously confident whose underlying health issues didn’t stop them keeping themselves well before, now feel vulnerable to the virus. They are getting out with a buddy, walking and re-building muscle strength and having a chat while they’re at it because as one said, ‘You can’t go for a walk on your own, can you?’ We are also working with VCH to recruit our own residents to encourage others to take up the flu jab, a VCH project with local GP surgeries.
This new partnership with VCH started over the summer when I heard residents in an Extra Care building used to lots of outside organisations visiting were deteriorating because they hadn’t ‘seen’ anyone. We still weren’t allowed into buildings so chatting with VCH we thought there may be a few musicians locally who would help.
We had 10 weeks in the sunshine with musicians who volunteered through VCH and performed Music on the Lawn sessions outside an extra care building; some came out to sit at social distance with family members and others watched from their balconies. It brought a lot of relief not only for them but for us who’d been worrying about those who had not been outside their flat door for 15 weeks.
With no family and if they can’t use a phone or any other form of communication because of stroke damage for example, they rely on face to face activities with people from outside organisations who become a critical presence in their lives, and our wellbeing co-ordinators who are a familiar face. The only contact they may have had in this time is a quick chat with their carers three times a day. A staff member said she felt like we were puling some back from the brink.
A community group we are close to called Clapton Commons created a Memori-Wall as a way for the community to come together and grieve for those who died locally during the pandemic. For our residents they offered food and also created a card project with a primary school, voice recording messages back and forth between them and the children.
Through them we not only recruited volunteers who became staff members, we met a wonderful poet called Dermoth Henry who runs a poetry group which turned out to be incredibly popular. Whitty Gordon Projects short film of Dermoths Poetry Film is another powerful testament to how bringing community and meaningful activity together on our estates creates wellbeing for and between residents making our housing a nicer place to live.
SparkoTV: bringing the outside back in via accessible digital tech
Introduced to us by AgeUK East London who were trialling this innovative technology before lockdown, the people at SparkoTV kindly offered us some devices to help us connect those who are isolated and digitally excluded and their age friendly and experienced team are providing support to us and residents.
Like a Freeview box, Sparko is plugged into your TV and, via a regular remote control, you can video call friends and family and see them on your TV. It has a function to request local services so at the press of a button a message will go through to your local AgeUK for example, that a user wants to speak to them.
Absolutely amazingly we have digitally connected the digitally excluded. I don’t mean those who need 1–1 support to use a tablet, I mean those who cannot or will not ever get digital.
Here is an accessible way for people to digitally connect with others to reduce social isolation and access services.
The best thing about it for us is that there is a platform (like Zoom) within Sparko that means we can livestream social and health activity an the only tech anyone needs to be able to us is a TV remote control which replaces their current more complicated TV one. All from the comfort of their sofa. It means we have been able to reconnect many of the groups to residents again as well as introduce new residents to organisations even when they cannot come onsite.
For the zoom-weary, it’s easy to dismiss the idea of this but when you connect people with their neighbours who they were unable to see for 15 weeks and then they are seeing each other on their TV screens and laughing and jumping up and down and they have no other way to do that-some use WhatsApp but many more don’t — it’s pure joy.
On Sparko we are delivering Be Active exercise classes, quizzes and music sessions and there’s been much hilarity on there between residents who know each other and those meeting new friends from other buildings, something hard to do in normal times because of transport issues.
Tech, transport and built environment are recognised as the gateway infrastructure needed to reduce loneliness and isolation. In this Campaign to End Loneliness report we see that the work we have done accurately reflects the promising Approaches Framework (p14); it’s not doing one thing or the other it’s doing everything all at the same time and this approach needs embedding with full recognition that active outreach, that is to ‘reach, understand and support’ is the first thing that needs to happen.
We measured this when we ran a small research project thanks to a Healthy Ideas joint fund from City and Hackney CCG/Hackney Council. Designed by a colleague with previous expertise in falls prevention we asked ‘Can Older peoples housing help prevent falls?’ The report, out shortly, shows promising outcomes even without the final measurement (due to Covid-19) but we know that flyers, the offer of food, transport and free exercise wasn’t the thing that got people to the events and regular classes we held, it was door-knocking and building that relationship.
On Sparko, with active and ongoing outreach and reminding by phone (some remember, some don’t or need encouragement now and then), we have a weekly program up and running again but delivered via partners laptops to the resident’s TVs. We also installed it in some estate communal lounges where sessions are facilitated by the wellbeing co-ordinators for those who cannot manage it independently in their flats so we can reach more people on different estates all at the same time.
The Mental Health Foundation, Compassionate Neighbours, The Reader, a great pop up talk show called Talkeoke and various health sessions with RNID, Dementia Awareness with Hackney Caribbean Centre and Leyton Orient Trust who are about to deliver some strength and balance classes are all delivering sessions via Sparko as well as AgeUKLondon coming on to encourage uptake of the flu jab and NHSTalkChanges who are doing a low mood workshop and Whitty Gordon brought the young people back for a chat and reminiscience session.
Best of all residents are taking the lead, one is delivering her own watercolour art class for the others from her living room. Another is doing a presentation for Black History Month about his father who was a famous entertainer. The possibilities are endless.
Screen shot of Nolly delivering an art class via a digital platform on SparkoTV
Rose learning from Nolly via her big TV screen and showing everyone her impressive effort
Sparko is a participation platform designed to create an active community not only connecting people to each other and families via video calls but informing them about events outside. And although it wasn’t designed to encourage staying in, of course when people have to stay in, it’s perfect way of actively connecting. However, the irony is not lost on me that after all that door-knocking, even though Sparko is not a passive platform, we are encouraging people to ‘watch’ their TVs!
We were easing lockdown restrictions on estates, risk assessing with partners to come back in but as the rule of 6 came in we had to put that on the back burner again keeping it just to our own staff with small groups but now at the time of writing London has gone into Tier 2 forcing more restrictions.
The new normal keeps changing. Facilitating that missing link, to fill the widening gap in social care to those who need support is key to enable dynamic, interesting, caring partners to provide a range of services for our community to age well. Some work is being done on how this way of working in our housing can gain traction across a wider area and ideally there will be a more sustainable way through commissioning of partnerships between housing and health to provide these necessary services.
We rely, before, during and living with the coronavirus crisis on these kind, generous hearted and energetic ‘let’s-find-a-way’ people in organisations who are continually adapting to the need; they have filled that human-shaped gap in social care with their human kindness.
Here are the links again, do watch and share Dermoths Poetry Film , Compassionate Neighbours Partnership and Creating Communities MHF
If you can donate to the hospice hospice or any of the other charities mentioned
Commission Fiona and Jenny whittygordonprojects@gmail.com
You can volunteer with @VCHackney
For SparkoTV: info@sparko.tv
Big thanks to all the individuals in partner organisations who have their collective eye on our later life community
Fiona Whitty and Jenny Gordon for capturing the special moments and all the kindness and understanding
Jolie Goodman, Ben Plimpton and Susie Miller-Oduniyi from MHF for making it work in all circumstances & amazingly creating communties
Lucia Francois and all of the Compassionate Neighbours for bringing the places to life (and Joy and Richard the legacy co-creators of the hubs)
Maria Dragon from The Stroke Project for outstanding kindness and persistence
Rosemary and Zaniyah for generously volunteering with The Stroke Project
Special thanks to Liz Corr from Hackney Learning for bringing us the children
To nursery managers Sadiqah Maljee and Mehtap Yilmaz for huge effort and kindness
Julie Bromwich from MRS & all partners for support at Wellbeing Days
Khadra Samantar and Zaniyah Selwood (now staff) & all members of Peace of Mind for the uplifting Wednesdays
East London Cares team for, aside from caring and the no bingo rule, the door-knocking!
Lauren Tobias VCH & brilliant staff & volunteers for Music on the Lawn, it was actually lifesaving!
Thanks to Maxine Wells, Mia Golding & all estate staff, care teams and Hackney Welfare & Activity Officers
Thanks to the massive effort and generosity of the SparkoTV team for enabling us all to re-connect
Thanks To Dave Terrace at the Mercers Company and to Onye Imonioro & everyone at Connect Hackney for being so quick to tell us to do whatever we needed to do to support people in lockdown.
