Week one, group two…

This week I was assigned a second group by the council. Wellbeing Plus is a lovely group of folks based in Redcar who have an established small crafting group that meet on Fridays.

The Joint Strategic Needs Assessment is focussed on “promoting independence for older people”. These include increasing access to friends, family, money and resources as well as preserving physical and mental capacities and preventing cognitive decline.

In a similar way to inviting an electrician over to change the channel on the tv only to change it back, I felt like I was excess to requirements and interrupting what was already a very established programme with excellent provision. The value of the data from such a group will be both limited and skewed (many of the group travel, take holidays and are engaged socially). They were also not very interested in participating in a new arts and evaluation project. So I had a nice cup of tea with them and a chat, wrote some poems based on our conversation and set off home.

Here is one such poem that came out of the day: