Campaign to end loneliness

One of our longest serving partners celebrates, and we celebrate their involvement in the Campaign

In case you didn’t know, with all of our policy, campaigning, research and good practice sharing, the core Campaign team is pretty small: just 3 people.

However, we have a huge opportunity to maximise our impact through working with our partner organisations: we are able to reach into another 5 organisations (and more!) for expertise, staff time and ideas – on average they contribute around ¼ of the current actual budget of the Campaign – no mean feat in these days of tightened belts. These five organisations are officially called the Campaign’s “management group” and they lead the overall Campaign’s longer term direction, they are: Age UK Oxfordshire, Independent Age, Manchester City Council, Royal Voluntary Service and Sense.

One of our partners, Independent Age, is celebrating their 150^th birthday this week and we want to celebrate them in particular, and how they actively take forward some of the current themes of the Campaign to End Loneliness across their work:

1. Campaigning to tackle loneliness – Independent Age colleagues have not just been working with the Campaign on our Loneliness Harms Health campaigning, particularly nationally with MPs and Department of Health, but with other partners such as Centre for Social Justice on their Age of Opportunity report, which highlighted the need for outreach and matching people to their personal interests to tackle loneliness.
2. Measuring their impact on loneliness –  Independent Age are already measuring their impact on reducing loneliness –      which is something we are learning more about from as many of our supporters as possible at the moment in a project that aims to find out how front line organisations monitor and evaluate their impact on reducing isolation and loneliness in older age. At our now sold-out 19 June conference we will be sharing our interim results and the final report will be completed by the end of the year (and we will share this online after the event too). We aim for “measuring loneliness at the front line” to become a major theme of our work to support front line organisations in 2014 – so become a      supporter to be kept informed.

3. Reaching thousands of older people – Like many of you, Independent Age offer group and one to one activities. As well as these, they provide advice and information for older people, their relatives and carers to get the best care and support for older people, whether it’s in their own home, in hospital or in a care home. The Campaign team itself doesn’t reach older people directly, but we work with over 350 organisations who are our supporters, take action with us, and most of whom do offer activities and services to front line organisations. If you aren’t a supporter yet, you can join up as an      organisation (or individual) here.

For more information about Independent Age visit their website.

Over the coming months, we’ll be showcasing all of our “management group” partners, so you can see who we work most closely with, and how they are involved in the Campaign, so stay tuned.