Whether you are one or one hundred, BS3 Community Development wants support and bring together our neighbours to make our little corner of the world a wonderful place to live.
We know that children benefit from strong relationships with people of all ages. We also believe that there is a lot that we can learn from children. Their enduring curiosity, their individual outlook and their natural sense of fun make them the perfect little people to explore alongside.
Next year, we celebrate a decade of our nurseries linking up with older friends in our community to develop bonds and learn from one another. Before we start planning for this exciting milestone, we wanted to take a minute to reflect on where we have come from, looking back at all the ways we have brought together our littlest friends and our oldest neighbours for fun, friendship and creativity.
Intergenerational roots…
Our Intergenerational work began all the way back to 2017, when we started to take small groups of preschoolers to a local nursing home for weekly visits. For many years, we enjoyed regularly seeing our friends: creating art, doing puzzles, singing and dancing together. These regular visits created lovely friendships between the children and older people and ignited our passion for Intergenerational projects.
Lights, camera action!
As we became known locally for our Intergenerational connections, we were invited to participate in CPL Production’s television programme “Old People’s Home for Four Year Olds”. The series follows the emerging friendships between residents of a nursing home and four year olds, including some of our children and staff, whilst measuring the effect of being around the children on the older people. The show documented the health and wellbeing benefits to the older people, proving that being around children really can keep you young at heart. But just as importantly, the relationships between the children and older people blossomed and continued long after the cameras stopped rolling. So whilst the programme set out to document an experiment, it actually showed the beginnings of true Intergenerational friendships.
The challenges of Covid 19
When the Covid 19 pandemic hit, our Intergenerational work became more tricky. We needed to protect our older friends and couldn’t safely visit them in their homes anymore.
The world locked down and we even had to stop running Monday Club, our longest running Older Friend initiative at the Southville Centre. We needed to find creative ways to keep connecting generations and so arranged weekly phone calls between our Monday Clubbers and preschool rooms, to reach out to our older friends at a time of widespread isolation. We even taught some of our older friends how to use Zoom so we could wave to one another! During this time, we were approached by local poet and performer, Beth Calverley, founder of The Poetry Machine, to turn our lockdown conversations into a poem. Together, we wrote “Letting Our Butterflies Free“, which reflects on noticing small pleasures, enjoying the outdoors and the passing of time.
It was complex to re-establish our Older People’s Services after the pandemic. We were still very cautious about protecting everyone’s health and it took us some time to find a safe way to link up our nurseries and older friends in person again.
Art with impact
Looking back, we realised that all the experiences that we have shared with our Older Friends were founded on creativity. We decided to develop our Intergenerational work by creating impactful art pieces together. We are proud to have worked together on many projects, creating art for many community events over the last five years, including:
- Lanterns for the Bedminster Winter Lantern Parade
- Christmas corridor scenes and decorations for our BS3 Community Festive Markets
- An Intergenerational Art Gallery for the South Bristol Arts Trail (we even made a video on this one!)
- Wonderful windows for the Southville, Bedminster and Ashton Window Wanderland
Art in the wider community
More recently, we teamed up with local community theatre, Acta, to spread our Intergenerational friendships wider across the postcode. Our little artists in the Chessel Centre nursery created individual masterpieces to gift to members of Acta’s Making Time Group. We were so touched when our grown up friends took the time to write us each a heartfelt message back. We think this could be the start of some beautiful friendships!
What’s next for our Intergenerational work?
As we prepare to celebrate a decade of connecting our nursery children with older friends, we are delighted to announce that Charlotte Wrigglesworth, one of our Lead Practitioners, is leading the charge.
“We are really looking forward to developing out connection with our friends in Acta’s Making Time Group and already have plans to take the children to visit them and allow these new friendships to blossom. We will also be linking up with our Monday Clubbers to bring the children and older generations together over the next twelve months.
Charlotte Wrigglesworth, Intergenerational Lead
Shared experiences with older friends are so meaningful for young children. Intergenerational work helps children to develop empathy and resilience as well as helping them to navigate relationships with people of all ages and find their place within their society. We are so excited to open up our children to these opportunities and to get to know our older friends and neighbours”
We are so excited to share our plans with you for 2027 – watch this space!