Following on from Loneliness Awareness Week, here are some resources to help local Age UKs to continue tackling loneliness all year round!
Thank you to everyone who helped to make Loneliness Awareness Week a success! Following on from last week, there are some fantastic resources now available to support your regular work. Find out full details below.
The resources available cover a whole range of topics, including:
Supporting low-income households to overcome loneliness
Social prescribing to tackle loneliness
Loneliness in the workplace
Available Resources
1. Webinar – Tackling Loneliness at its Roots
If you missed our webinar, Tackling Loneliness at its Roots: how can we best support low-income households to overcome social isolation?, you can watch it here.
Thanks again to Jenny Paton from Age UK Wirral for an excellent presentation on their work tackling loneliness in conjunction with their local hospital trust, this is definitely worth a watch.
We worked with other organisations tackling loneliness through social prescribing to pool resources, and have collated some really helpful Guidance and Top Tips and Research and Evidence material.
3. Workshop – Loneliness in the Workplace
If you missed the workshop on loneliness in the workplace, take this opportunity to look at some of the material presented and think about what you can do to support staff and colleagues who may be experiencing loneliness.
4. Loneliness Minister’s Visit to Age UK Herefordshire & Worcestershire
And if you haven’t already, read more here about the Loneliness Minister’s visit to walking football in his constituency at Age UK Herefordshire and Worcestershire last Friday.
A huge thank you to everyone who worked to make the visit such a success.
With Carers Week and Loneliness Awareness Week both falling in June, here’s a roundup of Age UK’s influencing work across both weeks.
It’s been a busy month for the whole Age UK Network, with both Carers Week and Loneliness Awareness Week following each other during June! As you know, both weeks are major opportunities to raise awareness of these issues and to highlight the important work that is being done, and more that could be done, to tackle them. Read on to learn about some of the central influencing opportunities we engaged in over these two weeks:
Carers Week is delivered by Carers UK alongside Age UK and other charity partners as a celebration of the huge contributions of unpaid carers. This year, the campaign also focused on highlighting the impact of the pandemic on unpaid carers and calling on the Government to create and fund a Recovery & Respite plan.
Age UK’s role is to highlight the role of older carers and ensure the support they need is recognised. As well as arranging for two campaigners to speak with the Minister for Care and the Shadow Minister for Care during online calls, we also attended the Carers Week Parliamentary drop-in for MPs on 8th June.
Norman Philips, who cares for his wife, and Rasila Mehta, who cares for her sister, joined Age UK at the event and spoke to over 21 MPs and Peers about their experiences and the support they need to meet the demands of their roles as older carers. Alongside the more than 6000 campaigners who wrote to their MPs, Norman and Rasila demonstrated just how reliant the Health and Care sectors are on unpaid carers and made a very clear case for the need for immediate Government support.
You can read more about Carers Week and the Recovery & Respite plan here.
Norman Philips, Age UK’s Senior External Affairs Manager Eorann Lean, and Rasila Mehta
Loneliness Awareness Week – Tackling Loneliness with the Minister
We started the week with a webinar, chaired by Darren Henry MP, on supporting those on low incomes to overcome loneliness. We had a fantastic presentation from Jenny Paton at Age UK Wirral on their work with their local hospital trust.
To mark the end of Loneliness Awareness Week, Nigel Huddleston, the Minister responsible for tackling the loneliness agenda, joined a game of walking football in his constituency at Age UK Herefordshire and Worcestershire last Friday.
He got to see first-hand an example of the amazing work the Age UK Network does to tackle loneliness across the country. Walking football is a great way for players to socialise, while staying active at the same time.
The team spoke with the Minister about why playing means so much to them. Richard told him:
“I’ve made new friends and gotten to know more people. We all stop for a coffee after and have a chat. For those who are getting on or may have lost a partner, it helps with socialising. If someone doesn’t turn up for a few weeks, we reach out on our WhatsApp group.”
Richard, a regular walking football player
The Minister was happy to get stuck in and have a kick about with the team. It’s safe to say he thoroughly enjoyed himself and was very impressed with Age UK Herefordshire and Worcestershire, saying later:
“it was great to see their inspiring work helping older people make new friends while having fun and getting exercise.”
Nigel Huddleston, Minister for Sport, Tourism, Heritage and Civil Society
You can read more on the Age UK Discover blog and see some lovely clips of the visit on the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s twitter feed below:
The programme helps older people play sport for longer, keeping them active and giving opportunities to build relationships@FA | @SportEngland | @ageuk
We are deeply thankful to all our campaigners and all the local Age UKs who support unpaid carers and deliver services essential to tackling loneliness in older people. This work is essential for supporting the older people who need us most. Age UK will of course continue campaigning for them, to make sure they get the support they need.
If you have any questions about our campaigning work, please get in touch – luke.pilot@ageuk.org.uk.
