How does the “Happy Together” project come about?
It came about through an evolutionary process. This required a lot of hard work, a lot of relationship building, and a lot of discussion.
Initially, over five years ago, we met a group of carers in Newington Day Centre, and we had developed a really lovely relationship with them. I talked earlier about people with Dementia being marginalised; imagine then that you are the carers for people with Dementia. You are even more marginalised.
We thought it would be useful to work with them, there were about 12 or 13 women, and most of them were 70 plus years old. We spoke to Margaret McCrudden, who was the Manager of the centre, and she agreed to sit down with us and that lead to a series of projects working with those carers.
What was your aim in working with the carers?
We wanted to give them a voice and we also wanted to give them the freedom to talk about whatever they wanted to talk about. We had an objective to use music and song to allow them that freedom of expression.
We started out wanting to investigate the situation of loneliness amongst carers who are often on their own, they sometimes cannot communicate with their loved one, they can’t have a social life, they really are on call almost all of each day and we thought we could look into that.
There was also a question around the role of the carer and being seen through the prism of the person they are caring for. That they were seen only as connected to the person they were responsible for looking after. In many ways the projects were about people being seen and recognised again.
But the carers never or rarely wanted to talk about their lives. They wanted to discuss the issues of the day and we had to allow them the freedom to do that, to express themselves in whatever way they worked for them.
How does the project develop from there?
As I said we had developed a relationship over 5 years or so, and the Happy Together project was an evolution of this long journey and built up from the work we had done previously.
There was a lot of trust already established through the previous projects and so while we were working with a group of people who didn’t have Dementia, they were still intimately connected with the issue of Dementia and people with disabilities.
The Happy Together project was run over 15 weeks and we had funding from the Kingsbridge Foundation through the Community Foundation of Northern Ireland. They had been out to the Newington Care Centre, they knew about our work, and agreed that we could be funded for this new project.
There were two facilitators, myself and Chip Bailey, and had a plan for the project. Happy Together comes from a famous song by The Turtles, Happy Together, and we wanted the project to be upbeat, we wanted it to be enjoyable.
Do you think that elemen t was achieved?
We found out later thatright from the first project some of the ladies had kept meeting up and had become friends, and maybe a week or two into this new project one of the ladies said that the group really was a “happy” group when everyone was “together”. That was wonderful to hear someone say that.
