Promoting Social Inclusion of Elderly through Well-being Parties

The project SIPPE aims at increasing the well-being and social inclusion of the elderly by offering them better possibilities for voluntary work and participation in the society through social activities. The idea is to prevent problems like loneliness, health loss and depression by developing cost-effective methods to activate the elderly and, in this way, maintain their well-being.

In practice the project develops a concept called the “well-being party” where the model comes from network marketing businesses (e.g. Tupperware) but has no monetary aspect involved. Voluntary people are trained to hold parties for the elderly people’s own networks in their own homes or other places under different themes like healthy eating, physical activities and social participation possibilities. The project hopes to trigger a snowball effect where participants of the parties become encouraged to host own parties and even become registered volunteers themselves.

As a result of the project elderly communities both in Turku and in Tallinn have encountered several improvements. Participation of the elderly in communal voluntary activities has increased and thus also the social inclusion of the elderly has improved. SIPPE activities strengthen local safety networks and elderly are more capable to take care of themselves as well as of other older people in the community.