Embracing Age - December's Featured Cause

We are honoured that Embracing Age has been chosen as TheGivingMachine’s Cause of the Month for December. We are a small charity with big ideas, working to embrace lonely older members of our communities with friendship and support, and it’s support from organisations like TheGivingMachine that will help us to achieve our goals.

There are around 1.9million older lonely people in the UK, a 36% increase from 10 years ago. Research shows that older people living in care homes are TWICE as likely to feel lonely as older people living in their own homes. As one resident remarked, “You can be alone in a crowd, you really can.”

At Embracing Age, we rely on donations to work towards improving the lives of care home residents – one person at a time.

We transform the lives of care home residents, one person at a time, through trained volunteers spending time and building  friendship with them. This could simply be chatting together, helping with digital skills, reading to the visually impaired, going for walks with residents, playing games together, hand massages and basic manicures – the list is endless since each resident naturally has different likes and interests.

One resident described how her weekly walks with a volunteer had transformed her life. Another gentleman, a former WW2 army officer, tearfully explained that the hand massage he received from his volunteer each week was “the only touch I get”.

We have trained volunteers in every care home in our local area and are now rolling out our Care Home Friends project nationally. It costs around £250 for us to replicate a new Care Home Friends project, so the donations raised from TheGivingMachine can make a real difference in providing funding for new projects to start up.

We don’t just stop at befriending; we have also worked on intergenerational projects, for example pairing care home residents with school children for gardening projects and drama projects to produce plays based on residents’ life stories, and have delivered training to other local projects pairing up nurseries with care homes.

We’re also pushing to keep the fight against loneliness on the political agenda, working together with other charities to raise awareness of, and find ways to tackle, loneliness and social isolation.

Embracing Age is also committed to providing support and resources for families and carers of the eldery, by running dementia training sessions, collating resources on caring for the elderly and particularly to help those with dementia, and their friends and families.

We’d like to say a huge thank you to TheGivingMachine for choosing Embracing Age as their Cause of the Month, and to everyone whose donations will help to make our work possible. We also offer other opportunities to support our work – from volunteering as a care home befriender or project champion, encouraging your families and friends to support Embracing Age on TheGivingMachine or through direct donations, and raising funds for us via sporting challenges, bake sales, quiz nights and a range of other events.

We have a few charity places available for the ASICS London 10k on Sunday 5th July. If you fancy a challenge for 2020 and you’d be interested in running past some of London’s most iconic landmarks with live bands, DJs and thousands of supporters along the route, please contact us to find out more.

Every penny raised will make a huge difference in helping us reduce the loneliness and isolation felt by some of the frailest members of our society. Thank you!

Support Embracing Age via TheGivingMachine