It’s wonderful how projects, once established, gain a momentum all of their own. Whether it’s social groups, craft clubs or workshops, we’ve always made new contacts who prove to be enormously helpful to our groups. It’s the power of networking.
We couldn’t start a new project without good local contacts, although finding the right people to talk to when you’re hatching a plan can be difficult. But once a project is up-and-running things seem to pick up speed.
Keeping it varied
Our social clubs help older residents in rural locations keep up their social connections, but it’s also important to keep your brain sharp as you get older. People come to our Thursday Club to meet friends, play board games and do puzzles and crafts and we also organise regular talks. These have to be of fairly short duration to allow people to socialise afterwards, but they do add an extra dimension to the meetings and are open for anyone in the village to attend, whether or not they come to the Thursday Club.
At the end of last year, we asked everyone to suggest topics they’d be interested in and got a good list of ideas to work with. Identifying speakers to come and give talks has been great fun.
Fitness and fall-prevention
One of the most popular suggestions from the feedback was easy keep fit and exercise, so we contacted Northamptonshire Sport for advice. They run chair-based exercise classes called Get Up & Go, to build strength and prevent falls, which are designed to be fun. Most importantly though, the exercises are also easy to do in your own home.
We asked Northamptonshire Sport to come and give a talk and taster class at the Thursday Club and it was a huge success. Our speaker, Katy Downing, kept everyone laughing as she put us through the motions and people enjoyed it so much, they’ve been pressing the parish council to support a regular class being held in the village.
We think discussions are now taking place and really hope it works out. Warmington Village Hall is a wonderful venue, with its own car park, so we’re sure the classes would attract people living in nearby villages as well.
A local character
One of our stand-out speakers this year has been Evelyn, a village resident and regular Thursday Club attendee who, aged 85+, gave a talk about her time serving overseas with the Women’s Royal Army Corps in the 1950s. Her stories about what she got up to when – aged just 18 – she left the UK to serve in Singapore and then Hong Kong brought the house down! Afterwards she told us that doing the talk had given her a huge boost, which was lovely to hear.
Keeping it varied
So far in 2025 we’ve organised talks on subjects as diverse as birdwatching in the Nene Valley, Richard III, researching family history, the life of Sir Peter Scott and Norman Cross, the Napoleonic prisoner of war camp at Peterborough. Yet to come are a talk on the The Wildlife Trust’s project to re-introduce beaver in Northamptonshire and another on the Air Ambulance Service.
Useful links
Apart from speakers to give talks, the Thursday Club has proved to be a good event to brief people on local services. When a new demand-responsive local bus service was launched by North Northamptonshire Council, to connect rural villages to nearby towns, a representative of Shire Community Transport (the bus operators) came along to tell the residents of Warmington how the service would run and – most importantly – how they could access it.
Another opportunity arose when we heard that the North Northants Local Area Partnership (LAP) was undertaking a rural health needs assessment survey. LAPs exist to improve the coordination and delivery of health, care and wellbeing services at local level so we asked Ashleigh, their Stronger Communities Officer, to come and tell people about the survey.
Most of the members of the Thursday Club aren’t online and don’t have access to a computer, so none of them would have been able to participate if Ashleigh hadn’t brought paper copies of the questionnaire with her. At the end of the afternoon, she left with nearly 20 completed surveys and all sorts of extra bits of information she’d found out by talking to people face-to-face. And our session feedback forms showed that everyone who had attended had been thrilled to be asked for their opinions!
Final thought
Of course the Thursday Club is good for people’s wellbeing and helps to address loneliness and social isolation for the elderly residents of Warmington. But we think the talks add something special too. The feedback we’ve had has been 95% 5-Star approval from our registered members, even from those who weren’t sure they’d be interested in the scheduled talk. And inviting other people from the village to attend the talks has produced an unexpected benefit, because they’ve helped to spread the word about the club. And as most of them stay to have a cup of tea and a chat afterwards they’ve made new friends and village connections as well.