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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!

Awarded an honorary doctorate from University of Bristol this month for her contributions towards racial equality and social justice, we’d like to wish Barbara Dettering a huge congratulations.

As a pioneering civil rights campaigner for over six decades, playing a pivotal role in the Bristol Bus Boycott and co-founding St Paul’s Carnival, Barbara is also an attendee and secretary of the Malcolm X Elders group we support.

It’s so brilliant to see her important work recognised.

Read more here.

Support Alive and enter our fantastic raffle to be in with a chance of winning a week’s holiday for four in the South of France. Each ticket costs £10 and is a 100% donation to the charity. You have to be in it, to win it! 

The lucky prize winner will enjoy a week’s holiday for four at ‘La bastide de Magdeline’ in Provence, giving you the chance to really explore the French countryside, nearby towns and even the beaches.  

See here for full details and T&Cs.
Draw closes 18th October 2024 at 4pm.

It’s great to see The Hoppiness Project hit the headlines! Giving care home residents the chance to brew their own beer, our Project Manager, Guy, and Dr Karen Gray sat down with BBC News to talk about our collaborative endeavour to empower older people and those living with dementia.

Read the article in full here.

Find out more about the project here.

Back in August 2023, we welcomed Kat Lyons, the current Bristol City Poet, to our Brentry Allotment. They joined one of our regular Tuesday sessions, meeting some of our wonderful participants and seeing some of the work we do there.

Kat wrote a poem about their experience, which can be read below.

It’s a beautifully evocative poem grounded in people, place and plants, capturing the intersection of memory, ageing, and the joy of gardening.

It’s rich in sensory detail and has a poignancy that is especially moving, spanning the bittersweetness of memory and the moments of tenderness and warmth our sessions are full of.

Recollected Moments in a Brentry Allotment

A wheelchair-friendly path; a shed; a space reclaimed
among dementia’s bindweed.

A bouquet of gardening gloves; each week she chooses
her favourite colour, periwinkle blue.

The smell of her first garden; a yellow tomato
plucked from the tangled growth of years.

Fingers planted in the soil; his hands unsteady now but quick
to part the leaves and find the early raspberries.

A dahlia like a ripe peach; her face lost
in sunset petals; a bright-eyed prayer of thanks.

Mouths folding into smiles; a nonsense song in Welsh, a poem
to wake the words laid sleeping on the tongue.

A great lion of a sunflower; a shaggy head
that nods a greeting, bows beneath the encroaching clouds.

While the sun has been a bit shy, the forecast for our community gardens is nothing but bright with the busy summer season underway. From events, to new faces and community sessions, catch up on all the news from our various green-fingered projects around the city.

Get Growing Trail 2024

Opening the gates to our North Bristol Dementia-Friendly allotment this June, it was a pleasure to take part in this year’s #GetGrowingTrail organised by Bristol Food Network.

North Bristol Dementia-friendly Allotment

With the cooler weather and the relentless attacks from slugs, everything is a bit behind at our Brentry allotment this season. However, with warmer weather heading our way, we’re looking forward to things picking up soon – and with a hearty harvest of broad beans and chard this year it certainly feels like we’re heading in the right direction!

Wellspring Settlement Community Garden

Since last we wrote, we have started working with a new social prescriber from Wellspring Settlement, which has been lovely. We have also been working hard on our vegetable beds, primping our flower beds, sorting out the roundabout planting and watching tadpoles in our pond. We will soon plant native hedgerows and wildflowers in local green spaces and will be helping the Family Centre with their garden.

BRI Sessions

We’ve had a few sessions outside in the hospital’s courtyard garden as the weather has begun warming up, and we have received the fantastic news that the hospital charity has given us funding for another year of sessions! We have continued beautifying the garden and supporting family and friends in gardening with the patients and nurses. Feedback has been fabulous, with patients and nurses saying it is their favourite part of the week. One heart-warming comment came from someone who said they thought they’d ‘never do gardening again’.

South Bristol Dementia-friendly Allotment

We have had a wonderful first few weeks on our new South Bristol dementia-friendly allotment. The raised beds are now full of vegetables and flowers, we’ve planted hanging baskets and created a wildlife pond, and we’ve been busy getting to know the other friendly allotment holders! We’ve even harvested our first veg – some lettuce – an occasion accompanied by a loud cheer!

Hoppiness Project

We’ve run four sessions as part of The Hoppiness Project and they’ve been going brilliantly. We now have hops in the ground at both care homes and have brought smiles to many people’s faces. Residents were disappointed that we didn’t bring any beer to the last sessions, so we plan to finish every session with beer and a sing-song in future! Participant-led coproduction for the win!

Lawrence Hill Health Centre

Sessions are going well at our Lawrence Hill Health Centre, where we’ve been extending the vegetable beds, creating beautiful mosaic signs, making new raised beds and decorating the garden and waiting room. Our aim is to transform the health practice into a vibrant space for the entire community of service users to enjoy. We want to create an environment that feels brighter and happier, enhancing the well-being of all.