The Malcolm X Elders Group celebrated Black History Month with a brilliant afternoon of music, poetry, and amazing food.

Discussing the importance of commemorating and observing the occasion, Dr Roger Griffith MBE MC’d the day with everyone enjoying an incredible performance from the Windrush Choir.

Nia performed traditional songs in patois, which the elders had great fun joining in with, and even tried teaching our CEO Isobel some patois!

A huge thank you to everyone who contributed to the fantastic celebration!

We’ve turned 15! The opening night of our retrospective exhibition was a wonderful way to commemorate fifteen incredible years of Alive. Reflecting on our journey that began in 2009 and the various projects and services we’ve run ever since, the exhibition allowed us to consider the impact Alive has made.

We were honoured to receive a High Sheriff Award last night for our contributions to older people in Bristol. A heartfelt thank you to Richard Pendlebury for joining us.

As we bid farewell to our Chair of Trustees, Phil May, thanks also go to one of our biggest advocates who is stepping into his retirement. Phil has been at the heart of the charity for so long and we wouldn’t be here today without his support.

Welcoming friends of the charity, partners, trustees, volunteers, and both former and current staff, we are immensely grateful to everyone who celebrated with us.

Our CEO, Isobel Jones, remarked: “It was a privilege to share, last night, our work and those we have reached over the years. To pay tribute to our founder, Tim, and everyone along the way for their dedication and efforts over the years. It has just been incredible and very emotional!”

The ‘Celebrating 15 Years of Alive’ exhibition will be open until mid-November at Create Centre, Bristol. Free entry – all welcome!

The BRI Sanctuary Square Courtyard is home to our weekly dementia-friendly gardening activities.

Providing comfort and joy to so many older people at the hospital, we need your help restoring an important part of this healing space by mid-November 2024.

How To Help

We’re looking for donations of shade-loving perennials, such as ferns, heucheras and geraniums, to transform the living wall back to its former glory.

Together with hospital volunteers, we will begin replanting in mid-November, using violets, strawberries and ajuga propagated at our community sessions, plus the other shade-loving perennials we are donated. Alongside the beautiful Acer trees, colourful planters and wheelchair-accessible raised beds of the courtyard, this wall of greenery will once again help create a tranquil oasis at the hospital.

Where To Donate

We are gratefully accepting plant donations at the below locations:

How Your Donation Will Help

The Living Wall is an important part of the Sanctuary Square Courtyard where we deliver our gardening sessions for patients at the BRI. By donating, you will be directly helping the restoration of the space. Here are some quotes from patients who attended our gardening sessions:

To find out more, please contact us by calling 0117 377 4756 or emailing info@aliveactivities.org.

This year marks 15 years of Alive. To celebrate, we’re holding a retrospective exhibition at our home in the Create Centre: chronicling the journey of our charity, from its beginnings back in 2009 with our founder Tim Lloyd-Yeates, to the projects and services we’ve run ever since and the impact they’ve had on older people on a local and national scale.

Free entry.
From 7th October 2024.
Create Gallery, Create Centre, Smeaton Road, Bristol BS1 6XN

As he steps down as our Chair of Trustees and into retirement, Alive’s CEO reflects on the leadership and contributions Phil May has generously given to the charity over the last 15 years.

Trustees are the lifeblood to any charity; helping them to see them through the good and the bad times. At Alive, we’ve been lucky to have Phil May leading us for the last 15 years. We’d like to say a huge thank you as he steps forward into a well-earned retirement and we will miss him enormously. We want to thank him for his dedication, professionalism, advice, love and support that he has poured into the charity and wish him well as he enjoys his time on the golf course and with his beloved family.

Phil was instrumental in setting Alive up with Tim Lloyd Yeates, our founder, in 2009. He has been the constant for Alive over the turbulent 15 years we’ve been in existence. As a solicitor and being well-connected in Bristol, he was able to help Alive launch successfully and has continued to be at its helm. When Tim tragically passed away five years later, Phil stepped in as acting CEO. He supported the staff both emotionally and practically, enabling Alive to carry on and continue to grow in Tim’s memory. He was the anchor that held everyone together.

As Alive grew, he was the one who supported Simon Bernstein in his role as CEO. He was the one who steered the merger with Growing Support. He was the one who helped navigate the choppy financial and funding waters we found ourselves in. He was the steady hand when Isobel Jones stepped up as CEO and helped to mentor her in her new role. He guided us through COVID and continued to be the steady hand, ensuring we were tethered to our values and mission whilst we changed direction and evolved.

But as ever, his final duty was to find someone who he could trust to hand his role to, which he has. Kevin Woodrow has taken over as Chair of Trustees and brings an enviable skill set and sense of humour to the role, already looking forward to taking Alive forward for the next 15 years!

Good luck, Phil. Thank you for your service to us, it will never be forgotten.

Travelling across the UK to deliver our ever-expanding programme of meaningful care sector training and activity sessions, the past few months have been busy for our Training & Delivery Manager, Nicola, and her team. Here’s what they’ve been up to.

The Empathy Suit Experience

We continue to be overwhelmed by the impact that our Empathy Suit training is having all around the UK! Recently, Nicola took the suit to Avon Manor care home in Worthing, using the suit to give care workers a deeper understanding of what it might be like for the residents living with dementia in their care home, and how they may see their world. 

By using the suit in everyday care home situations, such as getting in and out of bed, being pushed in a wheelchair, having a drink and getting dressed, care staff were able to experience how challenging these situations might be for the people they support, and reflected upon their practice on ways that could make life easier for them. All of the team said they had learnt the importance of good communication skills while supporting residents with their personal care, reflecting on how sometimes words are not enough and we need to be aware of how we use our body language and tone of voice.

Worthing Manor have invited Nicola back to train their team for the third time, wanting to implement good practice and dementia awareness to all of their employees.

Alive Meaningful Activity Audit

Earlier this year, CQC changed their inspection process from the previous Key Lines of Enquiry to the new Single Assessment Framework, so we have re-written our audit to align with it. This enables care homes to have a full audit of their activity provision ensuring that the resulting audit report will match CQC requirements. 

The audits are held over one and a half days, and our trainer will assess the care setting on Positive Care Culture, Environment, Personhood, Community Links, Quality of Activities, Planning and Choice and Control. 

The Bristol Care Homes group are currently undergoing their fourth annual audit and, by following the recommendations in each yearly audit report alongside monthly Meaningful Engagement Everyday training for the whole team, they have significantly improved the activity culture within their four homes.

To find out more about our Meaningful Activity Audit, email info@aliveactivities for more information.

Men’s Groups

Staff in care homes told us that it is often their male residents who felt more socially isolated and wanted something more tailored for them. We listened, and launched our Men’s Groups. 

Ken, our talented facilitator, is a great connector, storyteller and fountain of knowledge, delivering sessions with men (and women!) in care homes which allow them to speak about what is important or meaningful to them. The sessions have been a great success, with topics covered such as teenage years, photography, and transport, and we always allow the conversations to meander and let the members take topics where they want them to go. 

Despite this summer’s disappointing weather and slug apocalypse, the time seems to have sped past. We’ve somehow adapted, and all our growing spaces have been productive, lush oases of green and therapeutic wonderfulness!

Read on for some of the summer’s highlights.

North Bristol Dementia-friendly Allotment

Our Charlton Road allotment sessions continue to have a hugely positive impact on participants as we welcome new and old attendees alike. This year, that included some lovely intergenerational sessions with kids from Love Squared.

We’ve grown lots of veg this year and have enjoyed sharing our surplus crops with food clubs and similar organisations across Bristol.

We’re also looking forward to getting some work done on the site soon to improve its user-friendliness.

Wellspring Settlement Community Garden

We have continued to grow, harvest and share produce at our central Bristol community garden and are enjoying working with the Wellspring Settlement’s new Older Peoples’ Engagement Worker.

We hosted a fantastic intergenerational feast BBQ and look forward to a series of foraging workshops and intergenerational apple pressings with the local community as autumn makes its presence felt.

BRI Sessions

We celebrated our first anniversary on September 18th! We have enjoyed working with the wonderful patients and staff at the BRI and are excited that we’ll be able to carry on doing so, thanks to continued funding from the Hospitals Charity Trust.

We have also been invited to speak about the therapeutic benefits of engaging with nature in an acute dementia setting at the upcoming UK Dementia Congress.

South Bristol Dementia-friendly Allotment

The summer has been full of produce, colour and connection at our South Bristol dementia-friendly allotment. We have grown and harvested some incredible vegetables and made creative artwork.

We were also invited to open the Talbot Road Allotment show and welcomed local MP Kerry McCarthy and Cllr Ellie King to the site.

One participant said, “This is what it’s all about: listening to birdsong and eating bits of onion. Suddenly, life makes sense”.

Hoppiness Project

We’re nearing the end of the second year of the Hoppiness Project now. Last week, we harvested hops together across all three care homes. The beer was made on Monday this week and has now been left wracked to finish fermentation. We can’t wait to bring some back into the care homes and sample it together over a good old-fashioned sing song and general knees up!

The project has captured people’s imagination—not least the press! We’re looking forward to sharing more about it soon!

Health Centre Provision

Sessions at Lawrence Hill Health Centre are now well into their second year, and they continue to transform the GP surgery garden into a vibrant wildlife haven full of ponds and various habitats, as well as a growing space with enough fruit and vegetables to share with patients from the waiting room.

This summer, we also ran a short course of sessions at Southmead and Henbury Family Practice Gardens for older patients from Mendip Vale Group. They enjoyed growing vegetables and flowers, engaging in green craft activities, and socialising in their accessible garden.

We’re thrilled with the response to Share & Repair so far. Launched over the summer, the project celebrates the skills and knowledge of over 55s in Bristol, all the while promoting intergenerational connection amongst the talented and generous individuals we have in our city.

The past few months have been busy with lots of exciting workshops taking place and with just a few more workshops left, here’s a roundup of all the fun had so far…

As well as skills and good times being shared, lovely connections and friendships have been made along the way. Jane has very kindly donated sewing machines to The Beehive Centre since running her workshop, Fanny will be running her own regular creative sessions after Share & Repair has finished, and a participant of Mary’s gardening session – who had never tried gardening before – is now attending one of our regular community gardening sessions at Wellspring Settlement.

A huge thanks to everyone involved so far, it has been a wonderful summer of learning and connection and it keeps on going. Keep up to date with future workshops here.

While we support those living with dementia and their carers every day, #WorldAlzheimersDay is an opportunity to raise awareness, share stories, and further support those affected by the disease on a global scale.

Our CEO, Isobel Jones, has written a piece to commemorate the campaign:

Dementia, as we know, is on the increase; 1 in 2 of us are affected by it. Dementia is a condition that unfortunately isn’t curable. It is misunderstood, perceived to be an older person’s condition and is often just associated with memory loss.

But dementia is not something we should accept as old age. It is not something that can continue to be ignored and swept under the carpet. The more we talk about it, the more we can support people to live as well as possible. So much is being done to make our society more dementia friendly, but it’s time we make dementia a priority.

At Alive, we are passionate about lighting up later life. We want to bring joy to those who are living with dementia. And we do.

Take Betty, for example. She is a regular at our allotment. She’s been coming since the beginning. She lights up when she opens the gate, and begins to water. It’s her job and her purpose. She is now living in a care home, but she still comes every week. Our sessions are her constant and her joyful moments of the week.

Take John, for example. He is a regular at our Dementia Meeting Centre. He lives alone and felt isolated and lonely. His social circle had dwindled since his diagnosis. But here he finds support, camaraderie and friendship with other men living with dementia. They play skittles, pool, laugh about the things they can’t do and congratulate each other on their achievements. They often joke that it’s like they are down the pub for 5 hours every week. 

They are living well together. But we need to create more opportunities like this.

We need to understand dementia, and break down stigmas and misunderstandings. At a meeting this week with a corporate partner, I was thanked by a member of staff who said we had completely changed the way she saw dementia. “I thought it was just old people who forgot things. Now I understand, I realise it’s so much more than that and I need to change my approach.”

We all need to change our thinking and support those who are living with dementia to lead lives as full as possible. It’s time to act on dementia, it’s time to act on Alzheimer’s.

This week marks one year of our gardening group at the Bristol Royal Infirmary.

Celebrating with a cake covered in forget-me-nots, the amazing BRI Dementia, Delirium and Falls team also filled the garden with bunting and banners as we commemorated the occasion with party food and flower arranging with blooms grown at our North Bristol Dementia-Friendly Allotment.

Visited by over 30 hospital staff members who came to congratulate us, it was a wonderful way to celebrate what has been such a impactful project supporting patients at the hospital.

Huge congratulations to Abi and her team, plus our incredible group of volunteers. Here’s to our second year at the BRI and new sessions at Weston Hospital soon too!