It's good to talk

Pat Fitzsimons, CEO of the Community Network, explains how the humble telephone is changing lives.

If I were to tell you that our charity ‘brings isolated people together’, you might assume that we run a minibus, or provide a club or day centre. In fact, Community Network does something unusual and unique – but something that makes complete sense and can change people’s lives. We bring people together on the telephone.

Our telephone befriending groups can provide company and social activity for lonely people, and support for those who have isolating physical or emotional needs.

Originally set up in Northern Ireland in 1989, the Network was intended to bridge the sectarian divide by providing an anonymous and neutral space in which the two communities could talk. The charity now provides state-of-the-art telephone conferencing facilities for the third sector across the entire United Kingdom, to help it meet its objectives efficiently and effectively.

The types of telephone groups we currently support range from those that provide help to carers and others who have isolating occupations, to friendship groups for housebound older people, to those that provide counselling for people suffering from medical conditions.

We work with the voluntary sector to help it implement innovative projects that use our technology. Take the City of Birmingham Library Service as a typical example.

The service had around 2,000 housebound residents registered, each receiving a monthly delivery of books. However, there was no practical way for these people to attend a ‘traditional’ book club – which is where the idea of a telephone book club arose.

The Network trained one of the library staff and a club member in how to conduct a telephone conference, enabling the club member to take on the role of facilitator. At the appointed time, each club member was called up and linked in to the group discussion about the chosen book.

Since then, the club has grown in number and meets on the phone once a month. The club’s been able to link these people from their own living rooms, rekindled their interest and given them new friends.

A strong strand of our operation is ‘inclusivity’. We have a number of public sector clients, especially housing associations, that use telephone conferencing to ensure that every member of a community is given equal opportunity to have an input into, and benefit from, their services.

By setting up focus groups, these organisations can gather views from ‘hard to reach’ communities – such as those who can not attend face-to-face consultations – and can get information across when other methods have failed.

Many organisations use our services as a substitute for the traditional business meeting, pointing to both the cost and environmental benefits associated with teleconferencing. Here, the obvious savings (travel time and costs, etc) are bolstered by less visible ones (savings on paper and no processing time for expense claims, etc).

It’s certain that teleconferencing plays a major part in being able to facilitate home, part-time and flexible working; it also requires far less time commitment from third parties who might need to be drafted in.

Our aim is to make the process of setting up telephone groups as easy as possible. Community Network provides training for the facilitators, and will supply a trained facilitator if you don’t have a staff member or volunteer to manage your new group. Groups usually have six to eight people and typically have a theme – reminiscence, bereavement, books, knitting… the list is endless.

With an increasing responsibility on the part of public bodies to deliver services equitably and effectively, as well as needing to consult with their customers and citizens, telephone conference groups can make a substantial contribution. They are cost effective, reduce the need to travel and provide refreshments, and depend on a technology from which nobody is excluded – the telephone.

Community Network provides a free consultancy to help organisations decide how best to utilise telephone conferencing in order to achieve the results they want. www.community-network.org.