News – Blog
18 June 2021
To mark Loneliness Awareness Week, we caught up with two of the Tech to Connect Challenge finalists, to find out how Covid-19 has impacted their approaches to tackling loneliness.
Loneliness has never been more prominent than it has been over the last year. Many of us have gone from feeling lonely on rare occasions to experiencing loneliness on an ongoing basis. The stereotypical image of a lonely person – older, single, living alone – has been flipped on its head completely, with people of every age group and background experiencing feelings of isolation.
Needless to say, this has had a huge impact on our wellbeing. Figures gathered by the Office for National Statistics between April and May 2020 found that of those surveyed, 30.9% (7.4 million adults) reported their wellbeing had been affected through their feeling lonely.
Thankfully, there are organisations which are working to tackle this growing problem. We spoke with Amelia Lee from The Proud Trust and Bruce Leeke from Suffolk Libraries, to find out how the work they have been doing to alleviate social isolation has changed throughout the pandemic.
“Taking part in the Challenge really prepared us for what we didn’t even know was coming, in terms of moving all our services digitally. A couple of weeks before the first national lockdown last year, we moved all our services online, which ended up being ideal for the situation we found ourselves in.
Another of the key learnings was around our digital support offer. We originally had a model to involve mentors, but after speaking with ChildLine, The National LGBT Domestic Abuse Service, Mermaids, The Mix and a few others, it became clear to us that we would do better to have regular staff on board. We now offer a web chat service, which is maintained by paid staff.
We do still offer a mentor service for the repeat callers (around 40% of our calls). Those individuals have a mentor assigned to them, who they can then receive ongoing support from. Oftentimes, those repeat calls are less likely to be an emergency and instead are related to issues such as chronic loneliness. We’ve recruited around 30 mentors so far, and they’re all trained and supporting young people right now.”
Amelia, The Proud Trust
“Since taking part in the prize, we developed a business plan and did some work on the branding of our solution – it’s now called ‘Discover More’, rather than ‘Happy Place’. We recently had a meeting with Matt Hancock and the chief executive of the NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups, and they both really liked the idea. Most excitingly, we’re in talks to integrate Discover More into the NHS locally and explore its potential applications in supporting the preventative health agenda.”
Bruce, Suffolk Libraries
“Typically we have about 14 young people come through our services each month, however in May 2021, we had 141 – more than 10 times as many. It meant that we had to have all hands on deck, every staff member that had any kind of frontline experience or community work was brought on to help us deal with these huge numbers. Unsurprisingly, we weren’t doing any events or outreach, and our training programme was put on pause for three months, until we moved it online.”
Amelia, The Proud Trust
“The whole idea of Discover More was to connect people to staff, to help support them in the community and improve their well being. During the pandemic, we went from running over 14,000 events per year in our libraries, to zero. Over lockdown, we ran over 5,000 live streaming sessions, which replaced some of those activities we would typically hold in-person. We also made over 11,000 wellness calls to elderly and vulnerable people, to check in on them and link them to other services that could support them. We also beefed up our website, so as well as providing online books, magazines, music and films, we added training courses and other interactive sessions.”
Bruce, Suffolk Libraries
“Sadly, people who are digitally excluded or have different types of disabilities didn’t do so well. For example, for some autistic young people, it was really beneficial to be online while for others, it really didn’t work for them. However, we found other ways to reach them such as providing care packages. We also bought people mobile phones, or gave them access to WIFI. The main thing we had to do is really try to match people’s needs, rather than try and guess what it was they needed.”
Amelia, The Proud Trust
“Naturally, it was most difficult for those who were digitally excluded, and were now left with no way to access a computer or internet connection. In response to this, we set up a ‘device to your door’ service, where staff members will take a device to an individual’s house and help them manage things such as their Universal Credit application, or book a GP appointment.”
Bruce, Suffolk Libraries
“One of the key things is to help young people understand that the things they see on social media isn’t the reality, and everybody experiences loneliness, in some way, shape, or form. I think there’s another message around understanding that you can have alone time without being lonely. We’re so used to having constant access to screens and receiving so much information during the day, that any time we don’t have that we immediately question how we feel. But alone time needs to be more appreciated and understood, and actually validated, so that young people don’t feel like they have to reach for a screen or speak to someone else to feel valid.”
Amelia, The Proud Trust
“I think the key to making loneliness more acceptable is to help people to understand that feeling lonely is an experience that we all have from time to time. It’s important to feel comfortable with that and look at ways that you can come to terms with it. Then, we need to look at ways of giving people better access to information about local events and services that can help them, which is exactly what we created our platform for.”
Bruce, Suffolk Libraries
“The process of developing and launching our service in sprints was really helpful, and enabled us to get stuff done in a really short space of time, but then have time to reflect on it. Even though we didn’t win, we did have a good experience, and it was an interesting process to go through.”
Amelia, The Proud Trust
“The insights and experience that we gained from taking part were really useful, as were some of the connections and networks that were opened up to us. I also think having strict timelines really helped to galvanize our thinking, and got us moving forward. We don’t have a dedicated team of people beavering away on our solution, it’s just something we all do when we can, but actually, the focus of the funding was a real incentive to just do it.”
Bruce, Suffolk Libraries
