Sharing stories, sharing life

In the Sharing Stories project, the National Foundation for Elderly and its partners develop a training for volunteers to facilitate valuable conversations with older people about their life stories. By having more valuable conversations and going a little further than today’s weather, people feel more connected with each other as well as with themselves and their own identity.

Social and emotional isolation happens to one in four elderly people as the network becomes smaller to share the story. Volunteers from the National Foundation for Elderly are an important support for these elderly people; they are the driving force behind our organization. We therefore want to educate them in a good way.

In order to get stories to the surface in a good way, one need specific skills. We notice that volunteers can use a more in-depth approach in this area and that is why we decided to develop a training program, supported by Erasmus+. Different types of disciplines are involved, included experts in the field of ageing, welfare, volunteer education and ICT. We are building a training module that helps volunteers collect life stories from vulnerable elderly people. The module contains offline and online elements that are attractive and easily accessible.

We expect our training module to help reduce the extensive social and emotional loneliness among elderly people. Volunteers will be better equipped and more self-assured in conversations with elderly people. This will also make their work more enjoyable. That in turn helps to find and retain volunteers. We trust that other organizations for the elderly will also use the module.

Website: www.story-tree.eu

Running: September 2018 – September 2021

Partners: Cambridgeshire County Council (UK), LIFEtool Gemeninnutzige GmbH (AT), RBS-Center fir Alterfroen (LU), Netural GmbH (AT);

Funding: Erasmus+