InCommon Foundation: Scaling Intergenerational Connection
Supporting more partner organisations to run intergenerational programmes, adapted to their particular communities, to improve older people’s connection to their communities and wellbeing.
About the project
InCommon is a charity and social enterprise bringing generations together. Their vision is to help create connected, inclusive and age-friendly communities. Over the past 5 years they have developed thier intergenerational programme, bringing primary school children together with their older neighbours in retirement homes and local communities.
Their next step is to scale their social impact by supporting more people to run intergenerational programmes that can improve older people’s wellbeing and connection to their communities as part of the challenge theme of supporting social connection in later life.
The programme has been shaped by participants of all ages through an iterative, co-design process and has connected over 1,800 people of all ages. The positive social outcomes provided for older people and children has been validated through an independent evaluation from Dr Ali Somers, a leading expert in intergenerational evaluation.
InCommon believe that there is potential for many more people to benefit from connecting with a different generation. To scale their impact they have developed a model in which InCommon supports other organisations to partner locally to deliver their own intergenerational activities, adapted to their community. Importantly, our innovative platform and support model will make these programmes more financially sustainable, by reducing the time and costs involved in managing projects and maximising the value that partners bring to the project.
InCommon will develop an innovative online membership platform for local partners to access resources and manage the administration of the project simply, alongside personalised support to get projects up and running. This model will support flexible partnerships between primary schools, housing associations, care homes and other community organisations so that each project is rooted in its local community.
As part of this project InCommon will:
- Support a cohort of local partners to run intergenerational programmes in 20 locations as part of a learning process. In each location, a primary school will connect with a group of older people living in retirement housing. In total, 125+ older people and 200+ children will connect and learn together.
- Further develop our online platform to manage the logistics of running programmes, from arranging suitable dates to providing appropriate activities, whilst ensuring effective safeguarding and monitoring social impact.
- Evaluate the success of the model and iterate it in preparation for scaling to support more local projects in the future.