Lindy Hou won gold at the Paralympics. These days she runs a weekly exercise class in Canberra for people who are losing their sight, because as she points out, conventional exercise groups are not always practical when you cannot see the instructor. What her class needed was not complicated. It needed a suitable room and a qualified teacher, and that is precisely what a grant paid for. Hers was one of seventeen projects funded in the first Connected Communities round from Hands Across Canberra and GreaterGood, announced in June, all of them built out of things a neighbourhood already had.
The others have the same homemade quality. There is an art project that brings older people living with dementia together with school students, and a program helping neurodiverse children find their confidence through playing games side by side. Genevieve Jacobs, who leads Hands Across Canberra, put her finger on why it worked: what it took was quite simple, straightforward community grassroots initiatives, with a low barrier to walking in the door. No new buildings, no grand strategy. Loneliness Awareness Week runs from the third to the ninth of August this year under the theme Make Room for Connection, which is as good a description as any of what these seventeen people did. Somebody opened a room, and other people came.
Our short take: reporting by Region Canberra, with grant details from Hands Across Canberra and GreaterGood.