Age Unlimited

From grant funding to market

Lynne Wealleans - 16.11.2011

As one of the projects to benefit from funding through NESTA's Age Unlimited programme, we embarked on a journey of project development which has been both uplifting and enlightening.

We originally had an idea for supporting people in later life which we have been developing with local people over the past 18 months. The non-financial support from NESTA has been invaluable and has enabled us to think in a different way about project development, looking at more creative ways to achieve the outputs and outcomes. We have been  co-designing and developing with groups of local people up here in North Staffordshire and have arrived at a peer coaching model to encourage people in mid-life to plan and prepare for later life.

Although very experienced in delivering projects we were still quite traditional in our thinking about financing them. And then NESTA, with Steven Leach from Unltd and Sean Miller from Nonon providing additional support, started talking to me about the potential for commercial activity around one element of our work and we designed a blueprint and prototyping plan around that.

As part of the service development we have formed a strong working relationship with a housing provider and had jointly tested some workshop outlines and resources to see how they would work in practice, they proved popular with tenants aged 50+. The housing provider also seemed interested in the workshops as a way to help people live well in housing association properties into their later life. So we asked ourselves, is there a commercial opportunity to market training that would address a number of issues? It seemed that through our service we could enable older residents to live better, maintaining their occupancy and independence for as long as possible, and the housing provider avoid unnecessary vacancies. It seemed like a win. Next we had to work out how we could develop this into a sustainable service model.

First thing: collect insights from different housing providers to test the ideas that we were coming up with. Their feedback to date indicates that some older tenants can become problematic for a number of reasons and that there is the need for a kind of change management intervention that is specific to the needs of older residents. Next we will be working with the housing associations to develop and trial the service further and see what their appetite is for purchasing the service.

Being an avid fan of Dragons' Den and The Apprentice I now get to test out some of the concepts and terminology I learnt from them! So I now get to test my 'pitch' and 'productise' as we take this process forward with a small number of housing providers with the aim of getting something in my 'order book'.

Lynne Wealleans, Positive Ageing Manager, the Beth Johnson Foundation