Smartline Research
Community engagement for health and wellbeing
For the last four years Smartline has been supporting the community to take part in activities across Cornwall’s Camborne, Pool, Illogan, and Redruth (CPIR) area. The activities have been organised in collaboration by our teams at Volunteer Cornwall, Coastline Housing and the University of Exeter.
How have we been finding out people’s needs and aspirations?
During the first phase of Smartline we asked the community to take part in our guided conversations initiative. This involved small group workshops and surveys. This helped us to connect with people to understand their community needs and aspirations.
Here residents join the Smartline team to plant bulbs as part of the green space initiative.
Residents told our researchers that they’d like more activities that bring people together and help people feel like they belong. Others wanted to improve their physical health.
We used the responses to target community activities that help to reduce loneliness, improve fitness and improve community cohesion. We organised coffee mornings, fitness sessions, IT sessions, arts and crafts, and developed a new green spaces project to create nature areas.
“Lots of people already enjoy the new green space and we were thrilled that Coastline Housing awarded us community project of the year for the initiative. Soon we will host a community launch event and look forward to welcoming everyone who has been involved.”
Reducing isolation during the pandemic
As we entered the second phase of Smartline in 2019, the new activities were affected by the pandemic. We made a swift decision to start using online platforms to communicate with the community. Alongside Coastline Housing we developed a virtual coffee morning.
A mixture of local residents attend, creating neighbourly relationships between Smartline participants and those not involved in the project. Discussions at the coffee mornings have also resulted in online craft sessions delivered by Ruth Purdy of MITBER, and online history talks delivered by Kresen Kernow.
We’ve recently started working with St Euny Church in Redruth to set up an internet café. Volunteers help to support the project, and organisations like the Job centre will be invited to use the space to connect with people.
These activities are more than just social events. They create community spaces where we can support people with a variety of issues from support with paying bills, accessing food banks, becoming a volunteer, accessing public transport and connecting to the community. We enable local organisations to host our sessions to encourage local involvement so that hopefully all of these activities can continue beyond the end of Smartline.
“We hope all of these activities will empower people to make positive changes to their lives.”
How have we made an impact?
Karen Spooner is pictured supporting members of the local community to use new technology.
During the pandemic, we collected vital data to understand people’s needs. One project involved providing more than 200 digital tablets to our Smartline community of research participants. We discovered that 22% of the community didn’t have internet and people found the tablets difficult to use.
We provided internet cards and 14 training events to help people use the tablets to use apps, complete surveys and see information collected through sensors in their homes.
People still found the tablets tricky to use, highlighting some of the barriers people face when using technology.
Despite some of the challenges, the tablets have helped to improve some people’s lives. Six months after the guided conversations we contacted individuals to find out if the conversations had made an impact on their health and wellbeing.
“An elderly lady living in sheltered accommodation with health issues rarely went outside. She was shown how to access an App called “Borrowbox” to download and read books, as well as how to do her shopping online. She has also been linked up with a befriending organisation. She reports feeling much more positive since having a guided conversation.”
What happens next?
We are now working on a new tool called the Happiness Pulse to help measure the impact of these community activities via questionnaires which will be shared digitally and on paper to maximise inclusivity. We look forward to sharing the results later this year.
Who is involved?
These activities have been organised in collaboration by our teams at Volunteer Cornwall, Coastline Housing and the University of Exeter.