Last week, Mirjam Kingma presented the initial insights from the so-called ‘Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) sessions’ from the PROMISE project at the IMISCOE conference in Girona. In these sessions, facilitated by Warsha Jagroep and Merel van Schravendijk (Pharos), older adults from diverse backgrounds engage in dialogue with members of their communities. The goal? To understand the community’s role in raising awareness of and addressing loneliness, and to identify exactly what community members need to fulfil that role.
The project focuses on five distinct groups of older adults: those from China, Suriname, Turkey, the former Dutch East Indies, and Iran. To date, the sessions for two groups, older adults from the former Dutch East Indies and China, have been successfully completed. The initiatives involving the Surinamese, Turkish, and Iranian communities are currently well underway.
During the presentation, Mirjam shared valuable initial findings from the completed sessions with the Chinese and Dutch-Indies community members and older adults. The presentation was met with great enthusiasm and immediately sparked concrete interest in the PROMISE-project among the researchers present. We look forward to the insights that will emerge from the remaining communities.