Social Science Designed Meaningful Friendships Service

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BuddyHub's 'Friendship Wheel' service is tackling the loneliness epidemic amongst older people. We surround a lonely older person with an intergenerational, supportive social group of 4, to help them rebuild their social circle.This project will design and pilot a parallel service to form groups or 'Clubs' of 10-15 people around diverse interests. This will help older people further increase their personal network with members of all ages benefiting from local intergenerational friendships.The challenge the project solves is groups of 4 require a significant commitment from supporters and larger groups may have more longer-term resilience.The number of friends you have is a key predictor of your mental and physical health. Having friends to socialise with and for support, protects against disease and cognitive decline.The flipside is loneliness: 2.6m UK adults always or often feel lonely and 1.5m chronically lonely people are 65+. The cost to the NHS alone of today's chronically lonely 65+ people is £1bn per year.Evidence suggests a maximum personal network size of 150 people arranged in layers of 5, 15, 50, 150\. Emotional closeness lessens with each layer. Adults mostly socialise with the first 15, our 'sympathy group', with 5 forming a supportive, inner circle. Our sympathy group declines into old age and it is difficult to build new friendships.The innovation is a personalised, matching, introduction, and ongoing support service so lonely older people can rebuild their 'sympathy group' with meaningful friends.Our novel approach leads to several meaningful, enduring friendships as close friends help in ways acquaintances do not and it is meaningful conversations not small talk which boosts well-being.By comparison, third sector loneliness solutions - traditional befriending and group social activities aimed at older people - encourage short-term interactions that do not rebuild the 'sympathy group.Commercial solutions can suffer from barriers due to the price point, and a lack of digital literacy, connectivity or hardware.Our service supports the creation of new friendships enabling people to sustain and broaden their social connections into later life.We also speak to the theme of sustaining physical activity as people with fewer social connections are less likely to be active.We also speak to living well with cognitive impairment as we accept members living with early-stage dementia and provide dementia training to vetted membersWe support people to form meaningful friendships who are often excluded by traditional services for older people.