As you may be aware, East Sussex Public Health is currently collaborating with partners across the system to find out more about how residents of East Sussex experience loneliness and how we might work better together to address this issue, thereby increasing community wellbeing.
So far local authorities, the NHS, the Voluntary Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) sector and others have been involved in designing and developing the project – supported by Collaborate CIC.
Read a summary briefing which describes this work in more detail.
Could you help with this participatory research to find out about people’s experience of loneliness and connection?
A key part of this partnership approach to the project involves the participation of wide variety of staff (and volunteers) from the public and VCSE sectors in conducting and capturing brief conversations with residents with whom they are in contact – for example, as part of their existing day-to-day work activities.
What is needed
- Do you have team members who interact directly with residents? (this project is seeking to reach people of all ages and is particularly keen to hear from those in East Sussex most affected by loneliness – see page 3 of the briefing).
- Would you be able to ask some or all of them to ask 3-5 questions during the course of their normal interactions, and capture the responses?
- Are you able to release these people for 1-2 hours to take part in an online briefing session to take place in early September?
Any support you can provide to the project will be useful as part of our participatory research team. Even if you or your colleagues only have the capacity to engage with a handful of people, each contribution will help to build a picture of loneliness and connection across East Sussex.
How you will be helped:
- Collaborate CIC will provide an online briefing and support to help each ‘questioner’ to understand what they’re tasked to do and why, and training in the ‘appreciative enquiry’ mode of questioning
- You will receive a toolkit for the questioners to take away and refer to as necessary – including the questions to ask and a method for capturing the answers
- After the enquiry phase is complete all participating organisations will be invited to take part in workshops to understand what’s been heard and start to designing our response.
GET IN TOUCH NOW to take part and make sure the residents you work with are represented.
Please email jenni@collaboratecic.com indicating the resources you have available to support the participatory research (ideally by Friday 27 August 2021 at the latest).
For example, you may wish to share:
- the number of staff/volunteers that could participate;
- the locations/settings/services within which they operate; and
- the broad demographics of people with whom they could engage (where possible)