Older Women’s Cohousing Project, London and the UK Cohousing Network

14 July 2009.

Amid all the discussion on today’s Green Paper on Adult Social Care, it needs to be recognised that government - and all those public and private sector bodies agonising about society’s ageing and the future of health and social care services –continue to neglect a much overlooked resource for limiting future costs – the energies, drives and preferences of older people themselves.

The Older Women’s Cohousing project (mixed tenure, modest incomes, 50-80 years age-range) is a living demonstration of the energies to be tapped among a group of people who don’t want paternalistic top-down services and who want a helping hand now before they get too old to do anything for themselves.

‘We will support each other in our own resident-controlled housing scheme run on mutual and neighbourly principles. We will also be a resource for our local neighbourhood,’ Maria Brenton, from the OWCH project, stated today. ‘What better way to reduce demand on health and social care services, than to combine forces to sort out our own way of living where we are not alone, isolated or lonely? We older women are the group who mostly live alone in old age. We have a preventive remedy to suggest to those who will listen. We also offer a dynamic model that other older people can learn from.’

70% of older women live alone in the UK. In 2008, a Help the Aged survey found a very considerable problem of loneliness and lack of social networks among the old. The BMJ recently featured a Swedish research report indicating dementia rates to be significantly higher where older people are isolated.

Charles Leadbetter wrote in the Guardian recently that ‘Radical public services innovation will only come from a markedly different starting point. The key will be to redesign services to enable more mutual self-help, so that people can create and sustain their own solutions.’ In the light of changing demographics and the incapacity of future working generations to support high rates of demand on health and social care services from an ageing population, there is a need for new approaches – one such new approach is the development of cohousing communities.

By all common sense standards, cohousing - a self-starting, self-managing intentional community of older people dedicated to sharing activities, keeping active and giving each other support, is a model that needs encouraging. It has been developed over the past three decades in Holland and Denmark, where a healthy, preventive approach prevails. This is what the Older Women’s Cohousing group and the UK Cohousing Network believes is missing in today’s policy debates.

Contact:

Maria Brenton, 07974 952419; mari...@safeserve.com (click on the three dots to the left of the @ for full email)
Older Women’s Cohousing group: www.owch.org.uk
UK Cohousing Network: www.cohousing.org.uk