Social inclusion of older people through volunteering in Estonia, Latvia and Finland

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The project ‘Let us be active!’, realized by partners from Estonia, Finland and Latvia addresses the problem of social exclusion and loneliness of the older people through the improvement of information about existing and development of new opportunities for voluntary work for seniors in Pärnu, Turku and Riga. As the population of people in retirement age is rapidly growing, the problem is accurate and important to be tackled within the Central Baltic region and new forms of work with older people need to be found. The exclusion as well as loneliness influences negatively the overall health and wellbeing of older people. Thus, there is a strong need to develop programmes to promote activities of seniors in their communities. All of the participating cities share the challenges and they lack experience and expertise to overcome them alone in a non-standard way. The overall objective of the project is to contribute to the improvement of social inclusion of the older people in Central Baltic Region. This will be achieved by working together with three municipalities on developing a programme that will allow older people to stay active and participate in their communities with voluntary work. The project will analyze existing offer of activities available for seniors, examine seniors’ needs in the area of volunteering and produce guidelines for social and health care workers to promote and support voluntarism of the older people. Workshops, meetings and events for seniors, health care workers and social workers will be organized to develop the new form of voluntary activities. At the same time, the information platform in each city will be established to reach out seniors. It will be managed by seniors themselves. The cross-border cooperation will allow the cities to learn from each other, share experiences and support each other with their specific expertise. The project will be supported by the experts from World Health Organization. Information added on 2020-05-14, regarding the mitigation of the effects of COVID-19 (the coronavirus pandemic that started in 2019) (English language only): Mental well-being plays an important role, when social connections are limited. A good example of overcoming this is a call centre service for the elderly created as part of the project Let Us Be Active!. The call centre is operated by elderly as well and provides a talking companion and information about activities.

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