Talking about loneliness this Christmas

This Christmas, TBD Marketing is lending its support to the Marmalade Trust, an award-winning charity dedicated to raising awareness of loneliness and empowering people to make connections.?

The charity is for all ages, and has directly helped thousands of people and reached millions more since it was founded in 2013. Its mission is as simple as it is ambitious: to create a society where we recognise that loneliness exists and support each other to make new connections.

For this week’s edition of Si’s Matters, we had a chat with Xanne Carey, Regional Programme Manager at the Marmalade Trust, about its history, its Christmas Cheer campaign and other programmes, and how people can get involved in the good work being performed by this small yet mighty charity.

Can you please tell our readers a little bit about the history of the Marmalade Trust and where the charity’s name derives from?

The Marmalade Trust was set up by our founder and CEO Amy Perrin OBE in 2013. Amy used to work as an occupational therapist, which brought her into contact with many clients who were experiencing profound loneliness and had nowhere to go and no one to be with over Christmas.?

She could see the significant negative impact this was having on them, and there weren’t really any services out there to address the problem. So Amy decided to do something about it by taking three older people out for lunch on Christmas Day.

It all snowballed from there, really. Amy was approached by GPs and even a local bank clerk asking if she could include more people, and soon three became 18! That first Christmas outing was a great success, and Amy was inundated with thank-you cards. This left her determined to change the stigma around loneliness and to help to build a more connected society – and so the Marmalade Trust was born.

As some readers may already have guessed, the name itself is inspired by Paddington Bear. Amy had a Paddington Bear toy as a child, which was a source of comfort to her when she felt lonely. And Paddington has many admirable qualities we seek to emulate: he’s friendly, proactive and has a smile and a hello for everyone.

In specific terms, what does your Christmas Cheer project look like?

We don’t want anyone to spend Christmas Day alone if they don’t want to. So on Christmas Day, our brilliant, dedicated volunteers will either take our project members out for a free festive lunch or pay them a doorstep visit, depending on each project member’s preference and circumstances.

Either way, they will also be presented with a Christmas hamper containing gifts. These are packed by our amazing partners, and include cards and letters from local school children – these are often the gifts that many project members treasure the most.

We work with referrers, partner organisations and healthcare providers working with similar client groups, who help to signpost people to us. When we first started out, those joining us for Christmas were predominantly from older age groups; however, loneliness affects people of all ages and we now work with anyone aged 18 and over.

In the runup to Christmas Day, we contact our project members to assess them and their needs, talk them through what will happen on the day itself, and put them in touch with one of our 160+ volunteers – these brilliant individuals are the key to our success, and make it all possible.

The programme has been a huge success ever since our founder Amy took out her first group of project members for Christmas lunch back in 2013. Last year, we brought joy and companionship to 222 of the most isolated and lonely people in our region.

Although the charity started out focusing on loneliness during the Christmas season, the Marmalade Trust has since expanded its remit to address loneliness more widely – can you please tell us more about your other programmes?

That’s correct. Our Christmas Cheer Campaign remains a central pillar of what we do, but we also run our Marmalade Companions programme and Loneliness Awareness Week campaign, as well as working with schools and corporations to provide education and training around loneliness.

Our Marmalade Companions project is a time-limited, one-to-one project that provides support to those in our community who are the most socially isolated, and who experience chronic loneliness, meaning that they feel lonely all or most of the time. It runs from February until July each year across Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire.?

Based on the enabling/empowering social prescribing model, our trained Companion volunteers make weekly telephone calls to project members in order to signpost them to local social activities and community support and thereby help them to improve their social connections. This is not a befriending service, but rather intended to support people in re-engaging with their local communities.

The Marmalade Trust’s Loneliness Awareness Week campaign is national in scope and aims to raise awareness of loneliness across the country. There is a lot of stigma around the concept of loneliness, which we are working hard to dispel by having open, honest conversations and forging supportive communities.

We want people to think about the language we use around loneliness, for example ‘combating loneliness’, ‘suffering from loneliness’, which make it sound like a disease rather than a natural human emotion that we all feel at some point during our life. It’s actually a really helpful emotion, as it’s a warning sign that indicates to us that we need more connection.

Each year, our Loneliness Awareness Week is dedicated to a different theme. This year’s theme was ‘Random Acts of Connection’, which was hugely well received. We've seen tens of thousands of organisations, charities and individuals get involved, including the Royal Family, the Prime Minister, the Mayor of London, NHS trusts, and all Government departments.

What do you want our readers to know about loneliness?

As I just mentioned, there’s still a lot of stigma surrounding loneliness, and I want everyone out there to know that it’s nothing to be ashamed of. There is so much shame attached to the feeling of loneliness, as if it were somehow a personal failing. And yet we all experience loneliness at some point.

We need to break down the stereotypes that attach themselves to this topic. We often hear them in the playground, and we can end up carrying them with us into adulthood. Sadly, loneliness is becoming ever more prevalent among younger age groups in particular, not least as a result of the pandemic.

An ever-growing body of research is showing that long-term loneliness can have a significant negative impact on people’s mental and physical health. This is why we need to raise awareness around loneliness, change the language we use when talking about it and create spaces and opportunities for people to build meaningful connections.

How can individuals and businesses get involved with the work of the Marmalade Trust?

We are always happy to hear from new volunteers. Although we have now filled all our volunteer spots for this year’s Christmas Cheer project, we are still in need of Marmalade Companions for our weekly telephone calls. Although we are Bristol-based, Companion volunteers can be from outside the area, as long as they are able to effectively conduct online research into services and activities being offered in the area where the project member they are paired with lives.

Businesses can get involved in a number of ways. They can book one of our paid Loneliness Training webinars, which allows organisations to help their employees understand what loneliness is, how it can be managed and ultimately help to reduce feelings of loneliness in the workplace and beyond.

The Marmalade Trust is always happy to welcome new corporate partners, who can support our work in many different ways: with a one-off or regular financial gift; by sharing the skills and expertise of their staff to support us; holding fundraising events or considering us as their charity of the year; providing us with grants to help us run specific projects such as our Christmas Cheer events; sponsoring an event; or introducing us to their networks.

Of course, we are also always happy to receive donations.

For more information on how you can help, I suggest visiting the “Get involved” section of our website.

Where else can our readers find out more about your work?

We are active on all social media platforms including Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube and X.

Many thanks for your time, Xanne!

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#MenopauseMatters to all of us

In this week's edition of the But, Is It Legal? podcast, I was joined by the force of nature that is Hausfeld 's CMO, Silvia Van den Bruel who spoke passionately about the topic of menopause and what we can all do to educate ourselves about it.

Please take a listen to her wonderful episode on:

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I hope you found this week’s edition interesting and thought-provoking.

Kind regards,

Simon Marshall

[email protected]