Bringing Generations Together: Unlocking Community Wellbeing with InCommon

In this Housing LIN report, Lois Beech, Consultancy and Partnerships Manager and Darius Ghadiali, Senior Data Analyst at Housing LIN, evaluate InCommon's online platform and the social impact of their intergenerational activities.

We live in an increasingly age-segregated society, with few opportunities for young and old to interact within the community. This is harmful for all age groups, but especially older people that live in age-specific housing and have limited connections to family or the wider community.

According to the World Health Organisation (opens new window), intergenerational connection is one of the most effective ways of combating ageism and it comes with multiple benefits for all age groups - from increased social participation to a greater appreciation of diversity.

InCommon, a charity with a mission to fix some of these problems, has received funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) to scale its intergenerational activity by developing an online platform to support local schools and retirement housing across the UK to set up and run intergenerational projects themselves.

This has now been branded as the Empower programme (opens new window).

To demonstrate the impact of InCommon’s activities the Housing LIN was asked to conduct an evaluation with two primary aims:

1. To evaluate the effectiveness of the online platform as a tool to enable intergenerational activity.
2. To evaluate the social impact of InCommon’s intergenerational activity.