Watch more of our videos on Shots!
and live on Freeview channel 276

I often get asked ‘what does Guild Care do?’. Guild Care runs a wide variety of services for thousands of people every year, and for people of all ages, but also runs shops, does lobbying and campaigning, provides transport and so on, so this makes ‘what does Guild Care do?’ a very hard question to answer simply.

But our new strategy enables us to answer that question much more clearly and easily – we reduce social isolation and social stigma. And we work with people with learning disabilities, older people and people living with dementia.

I want to talk to you this week about social isolation – it can affect anyone and older people are especially vulnerable. In the UK, there are 5.4million people over 75 years of age, with 2million people living alone – and sadly 1million who report going over a month without speaking to anyone.

This is tragic and hard to imagine, especially if you put the numbers into the local context with where we can estimate nearly 2,000 older people in Worthing go for more than a month without speaking to anyone.

Creating Connections - Doreen Mitchell, Doris Aylott, Daphne Ham, Marie Lemmon and Carole Skinner

What are the causes of social isolation? Getting older and frailer, no longer being the hub of the family, deaths of friends and relatives and all this can lead to depression, anxiety and a decline in health and wellbeing and even early death. And Covid has made the problem far worse, increasing the fear and anxiety among older people particularly, creating a vicous cycle of not wanting to leave the house, leading to increased social isolation.

We don’t believe this is acceptable. Social isolation should not be an inevitable outcome of growing older. So, we have built a project together with older people to address this urgent and growing issue, which we call Creating Connections.

Creating Connections was started a year ago and aims to combat social isolation and associated stigmas for older people in Worthing. We have set up around 35 offering a wide variety of activities, support, discussion, and fun for people over 65. We don’t charge, meaning this vital service is free for everyone, and we are currently working with around 300 Creating Connections members, delivering thousands of sessions over a year. In addition, we are also providing bereavement support, befriending services and signposting to other services.

But, there are around 25,000 older people over 65 in Worthing, and the number is growing, as is the number of people who are falling further into crisis, with added financial pressures.

Alex Brooks-Johnson, chief executive of Guild Care

Our ambition with Creating Connections is to grow the number of people we work with, to provide more specialist support in the areas of mental health, more support to prevent people having to move into residential care or hospital, and more support for older people to access financial support.

Guild Care has a long and successful history of harnessing the power and support of the local community to help those in the local community in most need and I’m really pleased to say that this continues today and is growing. If you would like to help us help more people, I would love to hear from you.

To find out more about us, please visit guildcare.org

What does Worthing charity Guild Care do? Chief executive Alex Brooks-Johnson explains