Can community media make older people less isolated and lonely?
“There is so much scope for people to work together to tell the stories that aren’t told well and to interrogate the world through the experiences and needs of their particular community.”
As with many small social enterprises, from the outside Social Spider’s business model may appear complex and confusing. We generate income through a mixture of activities, which means that explaining exactly what it is Social Spider does can take quite a bit of time and can often create further confusion.
Essentially, our business model means that we cross-subsidise some of the costs of our community media work through our social research, training and consultancy. Some might describe us as a ‘think and do tank’.
Community Media for Greater Manchester: An Ambition for Connected Later Life, is an example of our ‘think work’. It is a research project commissioned by Greater Manchester Centre for Voluntary Organisation (GMCVO) and completed in May 2018.
The following post comes from Mark Brown, Development Director at Social Spider CIC. Here Mark reflects on the research how it ties into his wider aspirations for community media in 2019:
“This year we got to work with Ambition for Ageing Greater Manchester on a piece of work that asked ‘can community media help make older people less isolated and lonely?’ It was great to get to dig down into the ways that community media might help to build community and change the way that people see themselves and the reality of their lives. Greater Manchester has a long history of people seizing the means of media production and a strong history of public service and regional pride. There is so much scope for people to work together to tell the stories that aren’t told well and to interrogate the world through the experiences and needs of their particular community. Doing this work in Greater Manchester gave us opportunity to set out the principles for bootstrapping community media projects. It also gave us ideas and we hope our work helped other people to put into action their own.
You can read the full report here.
My hopes for community media in 2019 are impossible to extricate from my hopes for the wider world. Truth and news are public goods without which we all suffer. The business models for making both of these things happen are, like so much at present, increasingly unstable and under constant attack.
Communities who are not served by journalism and who do not see the concerns of their community reflected in media are communities that become forgotten and forget themselves.
News is as vital as it ever has been and should not be a privilege. I’m hoping that 2019 will continue the quest for honesty and integrity in news and media making without bowing to cynicism and despair. We know that we have chosen a difficult task in trying to make community media work; but it’s a task that grows more vital by the week, not less so. In 2019 I want hyperlocal news and community media to further cement their bond with investigative and reporting journalism because we share a common cause of making the world knowable. Together we have to find ways to maintain and grow the machineries; skills; models and relationships to guarantee that people know what is happening, why it is happening and what any of those happenings really mean to their lives and the lives of others.”
