Community Makers
Welcome to Community Makers. We are a network of community groups supporting people affected by dementia to reconnect during the COVID-19 related isolation and beyond.
We are exploring the role of technology in helping groups get connected, and creating a knowledge exchange network to share experiences and advice.
We are also building a resource of creative ideas to inspire groups with different approaches to digital involvement, including ideas on how to reach people without technology or technical skills.
It is clear that post-COVID, we need to continue to use technology to support vulnerable people through local lock-downs, and future ‘waves’. Community groups are heading into a hybrid world of physical and digital connection, making the most of both. These groups have an emerging role to play in helping isolated people use technology to connect to their families, and in other aspects of their lives.
Latest news: Community Makers report published
We are very pleased to announce that “Community makers: report on developing an online toolkit for supporting people with dementia to connect during the pandemic and beyond” has been published in “Working with Older People“ Shirley Evans says “We learned so much from working on the Community Makers project and it is really pleasing to […]
Getting set up online
Where to get started? We have created a guide to the process of getting a dementia support group connected online, whether it is reconnecting with an existing ‘real world’ group, or setting up from scratch with a ‘digital first’ group.
This guide has links to resources on this site and external links to help, and as always we welcome suggestions on how to develop and improve this resource.
Latest insight: Facilitating online groups sessions
Our own experiences, and those of many others, have demonstrated that when running group sessions through a video meeting platform like Zoom, it is helpful to have two people with clearly defined ‘facilitator roles’. It is very difficult to perform these roles single handedly, even in a small group. This approach is seen widely in […]
About Community Makers
Community Makers is an initiative between the Association for Dementia Studies at University of Worcester, the UK Dementia Research Institute’s Care Research & Technology Centre (UK DRI CRT) at Imperial College, and Alzheimer’s Society, in response to isolation caused by the COVID crisis for people affected by dementia.
