If you’re planning to run a warm hub this winter, join this session to learn about how to reach older people in your community and how to best serve them.
This session will help you to:
- find and engage older people in their local communities, including older people less likely to access formal groups, services, activities and support. E.g. older men.
- Overcome ‘it’s not for me’ barriers and preconceptions to accessing winter hub spaces
- Provide an active ‘warm welcome’ to engage new people at warm winter hubs, build rapport and help them to build social connections.
Participants will be:
- Sharing insight from older people around preconceptions and barriers to engagement with a focus on ‘warm winter’ spaces.
- Looking at how to describe and pitch your ‘winter space’ offer –using language and images to address barriers to engagement and provide an effective steppingstone to engagement.
- Offering examples of outreach friendly comms to promote your offer to harder to engage older people.
- Looking at practical strategies to find and engage the older people you want to meet. Where and how to promote your offer including displaying physical information and how to approach and engage people out on the street.
- Considering how a conscious approach to welcoming people and configuring your space will enable you to keep people engaged
- Explaining why a welcoming approach across your whole organisation can help
- Touching on keeping older people in the lead, working with volunteers and managing challenging behaviour
There will be two opportunities to work in breakout groups with others to give you a chance to consider how this might work practically in your setting
Session leaders
Joanne Stapleton, GPM from Ageing Better in Camden – where they proactively met and engaged with thousands of older people who were not already in contact with, or were reluctant to access, formal services or support.
Jessica Duffy, GPM from LOPF, where the Time to Shine programme worked with over 80 local organisations to identify the ways they supported and engaged older people, especially those reluctant to engage with groups.
About the Good Practice Mentor Team
The Good Practice Mentor (GPM) programme is a new and innovative project that brings together legacy, learning and resources from Ageing Better, a seven year Test & Learn project that worked to reduce social isolation and loneliness in people aged over 50, and engaged more than 150,000 people in over 366 projects.
Since March 2022 the GPM team have been promoting the legacy of Ageing Better, sharing the learning, resources and skills needed to provide a coordinated and collaborative local response to social isolation and loneliness among older people, as well as working on a national level to address challenges faced by many larger organisations striving to reach, connect and empower older people in the community.
Find out more about the Good Practice Mentor programme and the range of support on offer by contacting Jennie Shrewsbury, Programme Lead -email j.shrewsbury@syha.co.uk
Session dates
There are four planned workshop dates as follows:
- 20 September – 11:00 – 12:30
- 3 October – 10:00 – 11:30
- 12 October – 11:00 – 12:30
- 8 November – 14:00 – 15:30
How to book
You can register for your free place at any of those sessions via the button below, or via the Eventbrite website.
