Promoting Social Inclusion of Elderly through Well-being Parties

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SIPPE strives to create possibilities for innovative voluntary work for elderly together with older people and NGOs. Through creating new, low threshold possibilities for participation, project aims to support general well-being and social inclusion of elderly and increase the number of elderly volunteers. Project will be implemented by developing innovative voluntary work options for elderly. It will be actively marketed to and by elderly and the aim is to recruit enthusiastic elderly to take part in voluntary training. Materials and online platform for training will be created together with the elderly before the first cycle of training begins. Training will be conducted in small national groups and distance learning, tutorials, study visits to Finland/Estonia and learning-by-doing exercises will be used as methods. By completing the training elderly will get the title of registered volunteer and they will have abilities to organize well-being parties for local elderly. Parties around different well-being related themes, such as physical exercise and nutrition, will be organized. Model for these parties derives from Tupperware but without any monetary aspect. Participants to the parties are invited by a host who offers her/his house to be a venue for the occasion. Snowball effect is generated and participants at the parties are encouraged to host own parties or even become registered volunteers by themselves. As a result of SIPPE implementation number of trained and active elderly taking part in voluntary work has increased both in Turku region and in Tallinn region. Volunteering has contributed positively on their feeling of necessity and well-being. Well-being of local elderly has improved in wider level as well since older people have gained skills to maintain their health and activity at the well-being parties. Moreover, there are more possibilities for social participation than before.

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