Anne McDonald, from Highland Senior Citizens Network, shares where Highland Truacanta are at following their activities being put on pause last year due to the Covid-19 outbreak and subsequent restrictions.
In March last year we regretfully decided to postpone our Highland Truacanta activities. The partner organisations – Creativity in Care , Highland Hospice and Highland Senior Citizens Network – felt that being in the communities was key to our aim of supporting communities to have conversations about end of life. We were challenged to come up with a response that didn’t result in the exclusion of people who are not engaging digitally.
Over the last year we have all been very agile in our service delivery. Highland Hospice provided Last Aid training online to at least 120 people. Creativity in Care posted out creative kits and delivered virtual and telephone creative classes, working in partnership with organisations such as HSCN, Connecting Carers and Highland Hospice. HSCN organised weekly virtual tea breaks, emailed and posted monthly news-sheets, hosted a weekly coffee morning on local radio, ran the HIghland Hello social media campaign and sent 500+ 'Silver Star' postcards for our 25th Birthday.
This experience means despite ongoing Covid restrictions, we can now see ways of realizing some of our original aspirations for Highland Truacanta. It was really lovely to catch up with each other and Caroline in February, and start to look at what is possible for the coming year. We were inspired by the activities of other Truacanta projects, in particular the Selfie Wings, Reminiscence Trail and Armchair chats.
Highland Truacanta 2 is very much in the planning stage, but will start with virtual engagement, being very clear that we are aware of the limitations for those who are not engaging digitally, and planning to mirror the virtual sessions with face-to-face sessions towards the end of the year. Local contacts, word of mouth, local press and radio will be critical to reaching out to communities.
Our main focus will celebrating and remembering people who have died, as the absence of ways to do this has been extremely hard for people. Each community will have its own solutions, but where possible we will be facilitating the involvement of care homes and intergenerational contacts. Stories, food, and creative activities will be key; feathers, leaves and petals were all mentioned! Alongside this we will be linking people into the Last Aid Training.
It’s great to have something uplifting and exciting to be working together on after all the challenges of the last year.
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