Almost 90,000 volunteers joined a campaign to help combat loneliness amongst the elderly during the pandemic.
CHD Living, a care home in the UK, launched ‘Adopt a Grandparent’, a scheme which paired elderly residents at their care home with volunteers through regular video chats.
Visiting care homes was prohibited due to COVID lockdown regulations, and loneliness in elderly communities was a huge problem because of this.
The Good Care Group, an organisation advocating awareness of elderly people, says “over one million older people feel lonely all of or most of the time.”
The Adopt a Grandparent website said about their campaign, “Adopt a Grandparent has not only helped to reduce feelings of loneliness, but it’s also given people something positive to focus on during the pandemic.”
Within the first three weeks of setting it up, Adopt a Grandparent gained 72,000 volunteers from countries including Dubai and Canada, as well as the UK.
As there were more volunteers than there were residents, CHD Living encouraged other care homes around the world to get involved to continue to connect elderly communities with others to help relieve their isolation.
The Adopt a Grandparent website says, “the success of this campaign has been monumental, and has transformed the lives of so many people.”
As well as helping the elderly, the campaign proposed a connection for volunteers who lost or lacked a grandparent figure from their own lives.
The campaign’s success was so large that currently, applications for volunteers has closed, but there is still a waiting list for those who are still registering interest in helping the community.
Photo by Georg Arthur Pflueger on Unsplash
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