An update from our Small Grants Fund

In April this year, we launched our Connecting Communities programme, a legacy programme which built on the learning and evaluation of Bristol Ageing Better (BAB). As a part of BAB’s legacy, Connecting Communities has extended five of the most successful models across Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire. One of these is the Small Grants Fund, offering local community groups the opportunity to apply for small pots of money worth up to £2,000 to help support the health and wellbeing of older people in their community.

The Small Grants Fund has now funded 38 such groups across Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire. Over the next few months, these projects will be evaluated by the University West of England team to assess the impact that small grant programmes can have on empowering local older people. 

We spoke to Jacqui and Gill who applied for the small grant funding to further develop and support the older people’s group they set up in Brislington.

Jacqui and Gill are a retired couple who live in Brislington, South Bristol, who set up the Sandy Park Residents Group for people to come together and socialise. Members range from 60-90 years old, although anyone who identifies as an older person is welcome to attend. The group meet every week at a local community venue and while there is no fixed agenda for these meetings they have covered a range of topics relating to health and wellbeing of the group members from managing health conditions to trying out seated Zumba exercises.

The group have lots of plans for the future such as getting involved in the Sandy Park Christmas lights display and creating a recipe book for the local food bank with a back-to-basics home cooking guide aimed at younger people.

 ‘During lockdown, we’d do our walk and we used to see people out and about, we always saw an older couple who would sit out on a wall by the church with their takeaway coffee. We didn’t know them but we’d wave and say hello.

Then we saw her a year later walking by herself, and I called out, “Ello lovey, where’s he to then?”, and she just stopped and broke down and said, “He’s gone.”

We realised that this is the situation a lot of older people find themselves in when they are feeling very alone and we wanted to create a group where people could come for some company.

We had a conversation with the church and asked if we could use their space for an hour a week, for people to have a cup of coffee and a chat together. Then we asked the local community development officers if their manager could give us £100 to run a group for 10 weeks as a trial.

We don’t have any formal agenda, people come in have a cup of tea, a cake and then chat, but the topics we’ve covered have been absolutely phenomenal. Me and Gill have been really surprised, we’ve covered domestic abuse, sexual violence in marriage, gyne issues, all kinds of health issues. But there’s a lot of other issues under the surface as well like mental health. One of the women who attends has anxiety and recently her friend she comes with who gives her a lift couldn’t come, but she managed to come anyway by herself. That for her was a massive step, everyone was praising her for it. It’s a really supportive group.

We’ve got a wide variety of people, lots of widowed women and a few people who are LGBT. One older chap is gay and he was quite excited to hear about mine and Gill’s life as a couple because back when he was a young man it was a custodial offence to be gay. The group have asked to see our wedding photos and want us to do it all over again so that they can attend!

It’s all very informal but we’ve got lots of ambitions for the future. We want to get involved in the Sandy Park Christmas lights display, run a bauble decoration competition for local school kids and have the group vote for the winner. We’re talking about making a recipe book too for people using food banks, things like basic recipes for what to do with a loaf of stale bread and cans of corned beef so that we can all skill share with youngers.

The Small Grants Fund has been wonderful, you are a lifeline because we’re not an organised group we haven’t been eligible for other applications but your grant enabled us to just do exactly what the old folk needed.'