In March, LGN’s Service Coordinator Ray Olaniyan was interviewed on the Simone Riley show on BBC Radio Manchester.
Here’s what Ray spoke about on the day, including information about the charity, how we recruit volunteers, future goals and how to get in touch with us…
ABOUT WHO WE ARE & WHAT WE DO:
“LGN has been operating out of The Inspire Centre for the last ten years and we are all about getting the community of volunteers to befriend and meet up with socially isolated and lonely older people (over the age of 55) to keep them company, have a natter, have some tea, help them shopping and have that emotional connection that is vital, especially in this time when 1 in 4 people suffer from loneliness and isolation.
ABOUT OUR RECRUITMENT LOCALLY AND WITHIN MANCHESTER:
One of the things I like about Manchester is that it is very centralised in its networks. We use MACC, a volunteer hub and we also get prospective volunteers coming to our website and we do outreach at universities. People are very keen to volunteer, and I love working with students because they are so energetic and want to make a difference, so idealistic, like I was before I became part of the system!
ABOUT COVID SETBACKS & RECOVERY:
I’ve had five years in the charity, and during Covid we did find the ‘Blitzkrieg’ or ‘love thy neighbour’ spirit took place. On the volunteer side we have had a mixture of people, even younger people saying that they felt socially isolated and lonely, that they needed to get used to speaking to people again. Unfortunately, on the older side, the confidence that they had to come out of their house for a walk to, say a community centre, was heavily impacted by the news feeds they were getting about infection. This set us back a year or two, especially with the BAME community, regarding coming out of their homes to community centres. We got more referrals from older people but from older people who wanted to remain at home. On the younger side, on the volunteer side, there was more empathy and that was great to see that they felt exactly how the nation felt, which was that lockdown in general was keeping people indoors.
ABOUT HOW TO GET IN TOUCH:
For anyone who feels they can benefit from our services you can contact me on ray@levenshulmegoodneighbours.org.uk or you can drop in at the Inspire Centre and leave a note for me and I’ll get in touch with you. If you’d like to get involved by volunteering, you will need to be able to volunteer at least one hour a week. You don’t need specialised skills, it’s more about an emotional connection with someone in the local community, to get to know them. There’s a goal-based element where by six months we would want to get the person out of their house and into a community centre, make friends their own age, and that’s a success. There’s also the long-term companionship element where it’s a case of ‘let’s see where this goes, we can be friends for life’. Those are the two ways we view the companionships, we call from ‘matches’. It’s been quite useful for us over the last five years, and can include everything from garden jobs to shopping, visits to MRI to general upkeep and welfare of older people.”
You can listen to the interview in full below:
