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Windale Wisdom Project

This project began as an initiative developed by Professor Mel Gray and Dr Jill Gibbons at the University of Newcastle and Wendy Lawrence at Alcazar as a vehicle for involving fourth year social work students in direct research as part of their research course.

Stage 1 comprised a small, pilot study looking at older people from the point of view of the contribution they would like to make to the community. It flowed from Wendy’s observation that older people wanted to make a contribution. In conducting this research, some of the respondents wondered when we were going to speak to the young people and the idea for exploring the experience of young families in Windale was born in order to discover whether there was any chance of linking older people wanting to make a contribution with young families in need of mentoring and Stage 2 of the project was born.

Also of interest in the study of older people, which the fourth year students aptly called the Windale Wisdom Project, was the notion of grandparents as carers and this remains an area for future study. Although not explored directly in the interviews with older people, grandparents as carers nevertheless formed an important part of the literature review conducted by the students in 2002.

The 2003 students added a review of literature relating to young families in Stage 2 of the Windale Wisdom intervention research project (report to follow).

In summary, the Windale Wisdom Project aims to build social networks by improving social support for families with young children as well as enhancing the connectedness of older people in the community. To this extent it has the potential to improve the health and wellbeing of participants in the belief that people’s social circumstances strongly influence their health.