Project lead: Other

Other project lead: Mountshannon Arts Festival, Scariff Bay Community Radio and the Chairperson of the Clare Older People’s Council was involved

• Local authorities
• Older People’s Association
• Private sector

How collaboration worked: The production of this booklet formed part of a larger wellness initiative with our County Library Service. Together we developed ‘Wellbeing Packs’ for older members of the library who were isolated at home due to Covid 19. The Chairperson of the Clare Older People’s Council was involved in this Poetry project and in fact submitted a poem to the booklet so she brought it to our attention. Following agreement by the organiser of the initiative, the Age Friendly programme designed and published the booklet for inclusion in the Library ‘Wellbeing Packs’. We used the local authority’s in-house designer at zero cost and a small portion of our Age Friendly budget to print the copies.

Older people’s involvement: Older people were involved in the age-friendly practice at multiple or all stages

Details on older people’s involvement: Older people were encouraged to write a poem and submit it for publication.

Has the impact of this age-friendly practice been analysed: No

Do you plan to evaluate your age-friendly practice? No

Feedback:
Very positive feedback was received from numerous library members and from members of the Clare Cultural Companions.

Reflections:
The booklet was a small initiative that was part of a virtual Arts Festival that took place in County Clare. It has received a great response so if we could do it again we would make it a county-wide project with a media campaign to encourage more older people to write poems for submission.

Challenges:
It was such a feel-good project that there weren’t really any challenges to be addressed.