Due to the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak, Our Connected Neighbourhoods will not be holding any face-to-face events until further notice. This means we are cancelling the partnership meeting on the 14th April, the regular Friday Stirling environment assessments and the planned conversation café on May 5th. The support cluster meetings in Plean and Bannockburn will hopefully be held online.
In order to continue to support participants and the wider community in Stirling OCN will be:
- Adopting a digital-first approach to our partner network, with video-based partnership meetings and a Microsoft Team group to allow flexible collaboration
- Putting together and distributing a regular update bulletin with the latest information on available support, suggestions for staying well and staying connected. This can be shared, printed out and posted to participants.
- Piloting virtual clusters in place of the planned support clusters for Plean and Bannockburn
We realise a digital approach will be difficult to do for some people, but we will look to print and post what resources we can to all participants. Our volunteers will also be in contact with participants as we do conversation café follow up calls and pilot the digital clusters and other ideas.
Extraordinary times call for special measures, so we have created a new section in our resources to support people to stay connected at this time. The focus is on activities – informed by a straw poll of dementia advocates and groups on Twitter – rather than COVID-19 specific information, which many other organisations are far better positioned to lead on. If you hear any useful hints and tips perhaps we can bring them to together and share them across our neighbourhoods.
Also, we would encourage partners to create information resources (whether these are videos, documents) we can distribute.
If you have any questions, please contact us at ocn@stir.ac.uk.