Make Sense
Hackney Caribbean Elderly Organisation
In 2023, the McLay Dementia Trust funded us to run three workshops at the Hackney Caribbean Elderly Organisation, a centre designed to keep older people from the Caribbean community active and healthy. This year we have returned to run another three workshops alongside the lunch club they provide.
This group has one of our largest number of beneficiaries per workshop, with 15-20 attending and getting involved in a creative activity. For our latest 3 sessions we have run silk painting, paper stenciling and marbling, and foam block printing. While last year we delivered screen printing, clay coaster making and felting.
“
We were delighted that Melissa visited our centre to share her arts and crafts skills with our elderly service users, including those living with dementia. The sessions were fun and stimulating. They especially enjoyed the silk printing session which not only gave them satisfaction in producing their own print, but also the activity generated lots of communication around the shapes, colours and textures of each piece.” Lullyn
Project Officer
Through our work with Hackney Circle we have found that running workshops alongside lunch clubs is a great way to increase participation. Of course people who consider themselves creative will naturally attend our workshops, but with dementia affecting all types of older people its important that we engage people who may not ordinarily think of doing art. The lunch aspect enables the participants to feel refreshed for longer, enabling us to increase the overall time of the workshop in way that is not intense. This also means we can engage in some more technical processes such a silk painting.
There is a strong sense of community within the Caribbean Elderly Organisation, and their shared cultural identity meant collaborative creativity was popular. Workshops such as the paper marbling, where they could all sit round the tray of water each placing ink onto its surface, meant the resulting prints were viewed as a shared piece of art amongst friends. Our paper stencilling workshop was also very collaborative through its delivery on Valentine’s Day. This was a great opportunity for us to share light-hearted stories of relationships, alongside creating a group poster from lots of different participant's heart symbols.
This project was kick-started by The McLay Dementia Trust.
