Rural Wisdom meets Connecting Equalities
What has Rural Wisdom been up to?
Our current phase of the Rural Wisdom project is coming to an end in the Scottish Borders and our new Connecting Equalities project is beginning. We thought it would be a good idea to bring the two projects together for the last few Rural Wisdoms sessions to make sure there was a seamless transition between the two.
Rural Wisdom is a project that listens to the voices of older people in rural areas and aims to empower them to lead change in their community. We have been working in the Borders for the past 2 and a half years and over that time we have looked at a variety of different issues.
Firstly, we looked at some of the issues that affect people across the region such as transport. As the pandemic struck, we focused more on the community of Newtown St Boswells. We managed to employ a local villager one day a week to support our work.
What has Connecting Equalities been up to?
Connecting Equalities will work alongside older people and groups to focus on empowering them to realise their human rights and influence change.
Just before Christmas, we held a drop-in session in the bowling club in Newtown St Boswells. We asked people to think about their village as a garden; to let us know about the slugs and snails, (things they’d like to change!) what is flourishing (working well!) and what are the new shoots (things they would like to see).
This conversation was great and there were some fabulous ideas about noticeboards, more group working and lots more. Some of the ‘slugs’ included many current issues affecting us all such as the rise in food and energy costs, climate change and circulating scams. These things have an everyday impact on our lives and human rights.
Community learning: energy
From this initial conversation, we also arranged our sessions in February and March. The February session kicked off with a visit from Changeworks, who came along to give us lots of advice! They told us about:
- How to make our homes more energy efficient – and save a few pennies while doing it!
- Information about some of the grants and schemes available to help isolate and heat our homes more efficiently.
- And they even helped us sort out some individual issues villagers were having with their energy providers!
More information about Changeworks can be found by clicking here.
We also invited Trading Standards along to talk about the latest scams and how to keep us safe from financial harm. Some of the scams they told us about were:
- People claiming to be from Chartered Trading Standards Institutes and pretending that you are entitled to insurance compensation. This scam can result in being asked to submit a compensation form.
- Text messages claiming that you have missed a delivery and need to book a new date, this can result in mobile phones being hacked.
- Messages being sent out to family and friends asking for money to pay an unexpected bill.
They also gave us some tips on how to avoid being scammed:
- If someone offers you something that seems to good to be true – it probably is!
- If something feels wrong – it is wrong.
- Scammers will try and engage you by starting a conversation, do not engage, especially on the phone.
- If you get a lot of nuisance calls, look into call blocking and new technologies such as TrueCall
- Never click on links in emails! If they claim to be from e.g. your bank or Amazon, go directly to their website and do not use the link in the email.
Community learning: accessing benefits
Our session on the 9th of March centred around benefits. Accessing benefits that you are entitled to is not something that anyone should feel embarrassed about. Accessing benefits can allow you to live more comfortably and allow you more choice and options when it comes to spending money. Benefits can also be a gateway to other benefits. This can be true even if you only receive a small amount from your initial benefits, such as pension credits. People who came along got lots of information, as well as a warm welcome, a cuppa and some cake.
Sessions that are coming up
Our final session will take place on the 23rd of March. We will pull together everything we have accomplished in the previous sessions and look at:
- Our everyday human rights.
- The impact they have had on our daily lives.
- How we can use them to make changes that will make the village a more inclusive place to live.
We will also come up with an action plan and a way to support those living in the village to begin influencing the changes that are important to them.