HOPe (Helping Older People) New Forest’s mission is to promote and improve the wellbeing of older people by offering support to address isolation, anxiety and loneliness. Its New Forest Befriending Service, which has been supported with a grant from HIWCF’s Charles Burnett Memorial Fund, has 60 befrienders carefully matched to clients, who are referred by GPs, social prescribers, care navigators or family and friends, and are visited each week.
IT’S 11am on a Wednesday, when Kathy breezes into Carol’s living room in New Milton with a cheery shout of “I’m here” and settles down to catch up on her news. For Kathy it’s a pleasant hour or two of listening and chatting and for Carol it’s a lifeline.
The former accountant, who also ran her own cleaning business, is housebound and beset by health issues, including COPD, asthma, bronchiectasis and arthrosis in her back and joints, that have robbed her of her mobility, her social connections and her confidence.
While her fierce pride rejects the notion she was lonely, she admits her life felt empty. “I’ve been on my own for 22 years and because of my mobility I hardly go out at all now,” she says.
“You just plod on and you don’t even stop and think about whether you’re alone or not. I must admit I haven’t cried so much as I did before Kathy was here. I don’t know whether I felt lonely but I just felt out of sorts, nothing was right, everything was wrong.
“I’ve had a lot of health issues over the years and they’re slowly getting worse and worse. I know in the end it will finish me off and sometimes I’d get to this stage where I’d think ‘what’s the point?’.”
Her quiet determination – she calls it stubbornness – meant she compelled herself to keep her home neat and tidy. “I find it difficult and if I have a project I want to do, it might take me two or three days to get it done but I will get it done,” she says.
It was because she was tidying the house she made the decision to donate some items to HOPe New Forest. “Their people come to pick the things up and we started talking,” she recalls. “One lady told me about their befrienders but I said ‘I don’t want anyone coming into my home’. I’m a very private person and I’d had a phone befriender a few years earlier. It didn’t work out because she was only 22 and we had nothing in common.”
If she thought that was the end of it she hadn’t reckoned on the charity’s equally determined Befriending Co-ordinator Georgina Towler.
“Georgina came round and asked me about the befrienders and I said no again,” says Carol. “But she came back again and this time she said ‘I’ve just brought a friend’. As it turned out, it was Kathy and she was bringing her round to see how I would get on with her as a befriender.”
Says County Mayo-born Kathy: “I just sat and let Carol talk and then Georgina brought me into the conversation and we spoke a little bit. Then Georgina suggested I went on my own next week to see how it went.
“Carol was very nervous and I was as well because I thought I was invading her privacy and she wasn’t too sure about it. But we sat down and just started talking about Christmas and things like that and then we just seemed to gel. After that it was no problem, no problem at all.”
Gradually the relationship built as the two women began to trust each other and the conversations became deeper. “It took us about three or four months to really get to know each other and build the trust,” recalls Kathy. “Each week we graduated on to a little bit more. Sometimes she’d say to me, ‘I’ve got issues but I don’t want to talk about it’. I’d say, ‘talk to me when you’re ready’. And then maybe six weeks later she might say, ‘I’ve got something to tell you’ and she’d tell me another little bit.
“I never forced her, never pushed her. I just waited until she felt comfortable. She knows whatever she tells me won’t go outside the front door.”
Having a regular presence in her life so suddenly was a shock to the system for Carol but she gradually adapted to it. “I really liked her right from the start because we often say we have a good old swear and what have you, we’re down to earth,” says Carol, who was born in Boscombe but has lived in New Milton for 35 years.
“Although we gelled, it was still very strange for me to think of someone being there but it was nice. Now I think ‘oh, Wednesday, Kathy will be here soon’ and that part is nice, you know? Having somebody there, knowing that they’re going to be there every week. My life often revolves around a Wednesday because that’s the only day it feels like there is anything going on.”
It has been two-and-a-half years since Kathy first started visiting and the relationship has grown from befriender-client to genuine friendship. “I’m so glad I agreed,” says Carol. “It has made lot of difference to me that I’ve actually got somebody I can talk to instead of bottling it all up and it’s nice to have somebody else in your life.
“If Kathy is coming round and I need a loaf of bread, I can ring or text to ask her to bring one, and it’s reassuring, you know?”
But it’s not just a one way street. Kathy often shares her own worries and gets encouragement in return. “I get a lot out of coming here ,” she say. “Obviously you get that satisfaction knowing that you’re helping. I like to come and see Carol whether she’s in a happy place or a sad place. It does make me feel good when I walk out the door and she’s feeling better.”
Georgina says funding from HIWCF has given the befriending service certainty and the resources to expand to meet a growing need. HOPe has four co-ordinators marshalling 60 befrienders across the New Forest area. Even so, there are always around 20 people on the waiting list.
“Some weeks we can get six new clients coming in, there’s always going to be a need,” she says. “We’ve taken on one new co-ordinator recently and the funding has really helped us to grow. Without it we wouldn’t have been able to grow the other areas we cover and we wouldn’t have been able to take on so many people.
“Every person we’re helping is one less person that’s not so isolated and lonely and, really, without this funding from HIWCF, we can’t reach these people.
“I feel fortunate that we’re there for them, even though they are trapped within four walls, they’re still part of our community and they’ve just got such interesting stories. I feel privileged to get alongside them and get to know them.”
Having the right resources means Georgina and her colleagues can take the time to match clients to the right befriender, which is the key to a meaningful connection says Kathy.
“Georgina says to me, ‘you’ve become more friends now than you are like client and befriender, because of the relationship you’ve set up’,” she says. “I think it took her about four months to match me with Carol because she goes into so much detail to make sure we have something in common.
She said to me ‘you will eventually get to know each other more and you’ll become friends’ and she was right.”
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