‘The Helping Hands’ is a group of six young adults who are part of a Saturday Social Group but also attend other sessions at Key Partner, Cheesy Waffles Project. Through KEY+ NCS, they have came together to take part in a community engagement project.
With the grand idea to build connections with older people in the local community and show them that younger people care and would like to meet up with them socially. To do this, the group came up with a project plan to purchase gifts to be given to the residents of two local care homes for elderly people: Kepier Care Home and Belmont Grange Care Home. They also planned to entertain the residents with an age old favourite game of bingo.
The group thoroughly enjoyed the KEY+ Challenge and were proud of their successful KEY+ pitch and project. Group members said “we all liked the responsibility of planning our own project, deciding what to spend the money on and what tasks we should do.”
Although the group weren’t confident in themselves at first, they came to grow and develop saying they had “learnt new skills that we can use to do more community engagement. We have all grown in confidence and feel like we could do more intergeneration[al] work.”
Overall, the group were most proud of “making people happy and putting on events that others enjoyed.” They also gave advice to young people saying KEY+ is “not as hard as it sounds” and “it’s a good thing to do for you and your teammates” as they encourage people to get involved too.
About the author
The Key