The Good Practice Mentor (GPM) programme is a new and innovative project that brings together legacy, learning and resources from Ageing Better, a seven year Test & Learn project that worked to reduce social isolation and loneliness in people aged over 50, and engaged more than 150,000 people in over 366 projects.
The GPM team includes; South Yorkshire Housing Association Age UK Camden Leeds Older People Forum Torbay Community Development Trust
Each partner brings a unique set of learning and skills to the project, and together we offer a wide range of training, bespoke support for your organisation and toolkits and resources to help you on your journey to reducing loneliness and isolation.
Capturing community insight through informal engagement methods
An introduction to different forms of informal engagement approaches to support you to engage and hear from the people in your communities.
Date and time: Wednesday, July 9 · 10am - 12:30pm GMT+1
Location: Online
About this event
Event lasts 2 hours 30 minutes
This session will introduce the idea of using different, informal approaches as ‘stepping stones’ towards further engagement, and demonstrate some of the options you can explore in more depth, such as pop-up events, street outreach and door knocking, with further support from the Good Practice Mentor team.
We’ll explore how to use informal conversational strategies to provide a ‘nudge’ towards engagement, promote your opportunities, and capture informal insight from the people in your local community.
We’ll share some examples of how outreach friendly comms can be used a tool to address barriers to engagement and communicate your message to the people ‘not looking’ for you, and have a go at writing our own.
Finally, we’ll create a map of local, informal assets and identify how these can be used as part of an effective engagement approach.
Creating a shared understanding and vision of community health & wellbeing
The session will support the development of local understanding of the wider health and wellbeing strategy
Date and time: Thursday, July 24 · 10am - 12pm GMT+1
Location: Online
About this event
Event lasts 2 hours
This interactive workshop will provide an overview of current health and wellbeing strategy and help you consider how this applies to your own work more locally. The session will be delivered in collaboration with the Good Practice Mentor team, bringing together local knowledge and expertise with our experience in using co-production and involvement methods across the UK in a range of settings.
During this collaborative session, the GPM team will help you develop your own understanding and definition of health and wellbeing and how this translates into priorities and actions within your own area.
The GPM team will provide an overview of involvement models and principles and introduce your to our 'Co-production from the Heart', which was developed in collaboration with community members during the lottery funded Ageing Better programme.
Informal conversational tools to gather insight from seldom heard voices
An overview of how to use street outreach as an effective tool to find, approach and engage people out in the community, and capture insight
Date and time: Tuesday, August 12 · 1 - 2:30pm GMT+1
Location: Online
About this event
Event lasts 1 hour 30 minutes
Proactive street outreach is an effective tool to find, approach and engage people out in the community. In addition to putting information into the hands of people not thinking about or ‘looking for you’, it can also be used as social action research tool - We call it SOSAR for short!-using informal conversational strategies and open questions, to capture and analyse insight from the people we often consider ‘harder to reach’.
This session will share the impact and evidence of the approach including examples of how GPM SOSAR training has supported a range of organisations to capture insight about everything from social connection, isolation, barriers and behaviour around health, from people less likely to be met and engaged via formal surveys, groups, services and activities.
An outline of further GPM SOSAR training will also be included in the session to enable participants to identify if the approach is something they would like to explore further, with the ongoing support of the GPM team.