At the end of National Loneliness Week, today and over this weekend, the Jo Cox Foundation is encouraging and promoting countless Great Get Togethers across the UK and beyond.
Spirit is proud to be partnering with them this year to support 30 community groups involved in (past and present) Spirit projects to host their own Great Get Togethers.
We will be measuring the impact of these events – tea parties, dances, play sessions, group walks and sing-alongs – on the wellbeing and social confidence of participants.
Earlier this month Ruth Hollis represented Spirit at a Creative Arts and Health conference on a panel of experts assembled to answer the question “Can creative arts address, and even solve, loneliness and social isolation?”
The answer is a qualified but emphatic yes – given the right conditions – they can.
When Spirit began to disburse funding in 2014 public understanding of loneliness was largely limited to the perception that it mainly afflicts elderly people, particularly post-retirement and bereavement.
Although loneliness was not at the forefront of our minds in 2014, we built the Spirit Theory of Change to steer the projects we fund towards improving individual wellbeing and social cohesion by helping people to become better connected within their communities.
Since then, our analysis of the wellbeing outcomes of participants before, during and after their involvement in projects shows that people constantly attribute increases in wellbeing to making a new friend, becoming part of a supportive peer group and the networks they built up through the project’s physical, social or creative activities such as walking netball, community gardening, dance groups, choirs and film-making.
They told us time and again that before the project they had felt lonely. This led us to look more closely at how the projects which most successfully create this sense of belonging do it. And because we’re a funder, we are in the lucky position of being able to do something about what we’ve learned.
Five years on, just as Spirit knows more, there is much broader awareness of the impact of loneliness on health and, importantly, an appetite to see the public and voluntary sectors taking responsibility for tackling it.
As I wrote last year, we now know that, contrary to the stereotype, young people between 16 and 34 are the loneliest age group and social media channels, far from helping them feel better connected, often intensify their feelings of alienation from their peers.
We have all seen the high-profile media stories about the suicides of Love Island cast members and of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who never shared her unhappiness with her parents, but whose isolation and unhappiness drove her to social media sites where she accessed distressing material on depression and suicide.
The What Works Centre for Wellbeing has deplored the dearth of evidence about effective ways of addressing loneliness in younger people. That’s a call to action for us all.
At Spirit we are responding by encouraging new grant-holders to address loneliness. We now expect them to reach out to people facing barriers that put them at risk of isolation, such as people with dementias and (importantly) their carers; ex-offenders; disabled people, including people with learning disabilities; and those living with mental ill health.
Even when Spirit-funded projects take a universal approach – bringing people together from all walks of life – we now challenge partners to consider how they might work more effectively for those with additional barriers.
Our £4.5m Get Out Get Active (GOGA) project run by the Activity Alliance aims to engage the least active people in fun and sociable physical activity. They position volunteer peer mentors and (non-traditional) sports and activity coaches to reach out to people in community centres, local libraries, GP surgeries and even local shops.
The WOW Spirit! project, which staged nine Women of the World Festivals in five cities over three years, involved local people in planning and organising the content of their festivals, encouraging isolated people to come out and meet people and creating a host of new friendships and social connections in the process – for example, an evaluator estimated that 30+ new networks and initiatives grew out of the 2016 Bradford WOW Festival, and most of these are still active.
We have seen the wellbeing of people living with dementia, and of their carers (a particularly isolated group), increase significantly through engagement with Our Day Out, a project bringing people together through regular music and dance activities in rural Norfolk.
We have just successfully bid for £1.5 million from the DCMS Tampon Tax pot to award grants through a Carers’ Music Fund which will offer women carers opportunities to take time out to make and enjoy music.
Reading Rooms, a project in Derry, Northern Ireland, run by Verbal Arts, demonstrates significant wellbeing increases in former offenders and those at risk of offending – another group that is traditionally isolated from supportive networks.
In these, and across our other funded projects, we are working with the What Works Centre for Wellbeing and others to assess loneliness using the UK national indicators adopted in 2018, taken from the University of California (UCLA) loneliness measurement scale.
We will continue to highlight this hugely important topic by publishing our own research on how best to reach and enhance the lives of lonely and isolated beneficiaries, and by taking a flexible approach to the grant management of our partners as they work through the implications of the learning, using it to adapt their practice to help connect even more people.