Last month the Campaign team travelled to Manchester, to host the second in our series of regional summits. Our aim was to gather together a room full of the people who are in the best position to help get things happening around loneliness – this time in the Noth West of England.

During the course of the day we heard presentations from a range of interesting and inspiring speakers, but more importantly, we think, we got people talking and working together to think about how they could end loneliness locally. Its early days, but we think this might be the start of something big.

For the Campaign it was exciting to see so many people from the key organisations sitting round a table talking seriously about what could be done to tackle loneliness in their area of work, or in their communities. Public health experts were talking to older people’s forums. Leading academics were discussing how loneliness can impact health with local authority commissioners. Voluntary sector representatives were working with Clinical Commissioning Groups on how the health service can help. The room was buzzing with new ideas and examples of how people are making progress and addressing loneliness in ways that really work in their communities.

If you attended this event – please tell us in the comments below how you think it went and what you got out of it or though could have been improved.

And, whether you were there or not, please help us to ensure more people hear about the importance of tackling loneliness, by watching and sharing our video of highlights from the event. You can also go here to see full length videos of our speakers’ presentations.