Home Page
Introduction
Local Friends aims to build the capacity of people in the local community to care for one another through volunteers from local churches and other trusted groups providing human contact, listening and basic practical support.
Our goal is community building through pastoral care.
The original strategy had to be modified because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The ‘core strategy’ remains unchanged, but alongside that we have developed the ‘Good Neighbours’ plan to enable more people to be involved in caring from a distance.
The Core Strategy
In many communities you can find:
- a significant number of lonely, disconnected people whose isolation causes them to feel unhappy and makes them far more likely to suffer from a wide range of problems;
- a GP surgery which sees many of these people and recognises that many patients come to them primarily because they are lonely or suffer from other non-medical problems; and
- a local church which has a reasonably effective system of pastoral care for its members and their friends and a desire to serve their local community.
Local Friends is a way to help all three groups through building relationships in the local community, helping isolated people to connect with others and discover what they can contribute.
By supporting one another, we become happier and healthier, more resilient and less dependent on the services of GPs and other professionals.
Good Neighbours
The initial focus of Good Neighbours is to provide practical support to isolated people, primarily through phone contact, shopping and collecting prescriptions.
Some of this support is meeting a one-off or short-term need, which we are happy to do. When we have longer term contact with people, we hope to build a relationship which can then be built upon, as we aim to do in the original strategy.
What We Offer
We are:
- offering simple human contact, not solving problems;
- responding to what the person being visited wants to talk about;
- not aiming to talk about matters of faith, but not avoiding the subject either;
- aiming to draw people into the wider community;
- seeking to build a friendship which can then be shared and extended to others;
- not offering a commitment to weekly visits for the rest of your life, but open to the possibility of establishing a lifelong friendship.
Most of the key information is currently on the Documents page. If you would like to know more, please visit our Contact page for details of how to get in touch.
Please feel free to contact us, or to forward details of this site or any of our documents to people who you think might be interested in the project, and especially to anyone who might be interested in participating, supporting or praying for us. Thank you.
