ham Experiment and others have strug- gled to sustain themselves is that they often relied on charismatic individuals and when they were no longer around, there wasn’t enough built-in sustainabil- ity. I know that 65 is in good hands with Trudy because she promotes the funda- mental ethos which is that the guardians of No 65 are not an organisation but the people who use it. That might sound terribly idealistic but, five years on, it is still the reality of it.” Malcolm agrees, giving a personal example: “I set up a GP surgery that focussed on arts and health and the succession planning was not even con- sidered. It was celebrated by the local health trust but no one thought about what would happen once the leading people left, and it all died a death.”
Health and digital
No 65 has been extolled as a pilot digital health and literacy hub. But both Ian and Malcolm say these are not core to its mission.
“Digital technology had very little to do with our original concept,” Ian says “But it gave us the opportunity to test out ideas and loads of different things have come from it.”
He said the connection with NHS Digital led them to work with the Good Things Foundation “who were brilliant with us, incredibly helpful with a range of skills we didn’t have .”
Case studies and discussion about the project can be found on the Good Things Foundation website
https://bit.ly/3v3Mb- WU work they have done and include examples like a dementia sufferer being shown how to make facetime calls to his family because they it made communi- cation easier than the telephone. But Ian said No 65 probably wasn’t the holy grail the NHS was looking for. “I think they have the idea that the more people engage with digital tech- nology the easier the NHS is going to be to manage. They want pilot projects with scalability and rollouts. But you’re not going to get a model here where you press a button and it explodes into 500 centres across the country. They are looking for the magic secret of engage- ment with communities, but missing the point that the character of every project has to be built from within the community not from an organisational process.”
Trust
Ian believes a missing ingredient is often trust. Not so much about trusting people with money – but trusting relationships that already exist in communities. “You can go off and get £20k from a funder but then you have to fulfil a load of
April-May 2022
Trudy Hollow at No 65 High Street.
obligations that take you off in the wrong direction – so the money is the tail wagging the dog.”
In Nailsea trust has built up over many years “The fact that I was town clerk for 13 years helped. A lot of persuasion was needed, a lot of work. I couldn’t convince 20 councillors, but I only had to convince enough of them. It definitely isn’t a model you could just chuck money at and it’ll work.”
Where do libraries fit in? Ian says: “The temptation is to see a building as providing a service and say to people ‘this is what we offer, either engage or don’t ’. Like libraries we are one of the ‘Great Good Places’ in communities because we’re connecting people. Librar- ies, like No 65, are part of the local fabric where people can go for different things and are trusted sources of information. The reasons people cross the threshold of a library are likely to be the same ones for coming to No 65, including asking for some-
thing about healthcare that they don’t want to ask their GP about. The problem comes at the point where the system says, ‘I’m sorry we can’t help you and people then feel disconnected and isolated’. Libraries and places like 65 can focus on each other’s strengths. Depending on an individual’s need, the library might be the best place to go, or No 65 because it’s a more informal casual kind of arrangement”
Work to do
“Work with the library doesn’t go much beyond advertising each other’s events” Trudy says, “Maybe there are things that librarians are asked about, and would like to help with, but do not have time, like looking into things like Ukrainian refugee applications.”
These relationships exist with all sorts of groups in the community. “If I get a cus- tomer in here with a particular problem that I think someone else could help with, we liaise with each other. So, for example I have a good relationship with the two
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