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Involving older people

November 2011:  New research released from WRVS shows that services older people believe are crucial to their well-being are suffering as a result of government cuts across the country and creating greater pressures on the health service.

Read our phase one research report Voices of well-being as a full report or summary and news story

This is a critical time in the national debate around supporting older people to lead full lives as active citizens. Shaping our Age is a three-year action research project explores how older people define their well-being, and is developing participatory ways in which older people can help each other to achieve their well-being. It will provide the tools and campaigning materials that could exert massive influence and transform how the entire sector of older people’s services approaches the way it supports and enables older people in their well-being.

Our project will:

• support older people to define well-being and measures of their well-being
• identify innovative ways (drawing on participatory methods) for older people individually and collectively to improve their own well-being
• provide the evidence base and tools needed for WRVS and other commissioners and providers to transform the support they offer to improve older people’s well-being
• and campaign for all providers, commissioners and policy makers to put well-being, as defined by older people, at the centre of their work.

The project is in four phases:

Phase 1
National consultation on well-being with diverse range of older people across the UK – interviews and focus groups.

Phase 2
Defining indicators of well-being and selection of five WRVS projects to participate.

Phase 3
Local activities in the five local sites supported by part-time sessional workers.

Phase 4
Dissemination and implementation.

The project is led by a Project Group including executive directors from WRVS and our two academic partners - Professor Peter Beresford OBE from the Centre for Citizen Participation, Brunel University and Jennie Fleming, Director of the Centre for Social Action, De Montfort University.

The Project Group works closely together with an Older People’s Reference Group who help focus and steer the research in all phases. Working with both groups will be a Partners’ Group, where senior representatives from other organisations across the older people’s sector have been invited to input into the project.

You can read more about the project in the Shaping our Age launch paper