Yesterday the Good Gym was featured on BBC London News.  It was very exciting for us to see the project through someone else’s eyes - it was even more exciting to have a reason to go and spend a bit of time with one of our pairs of runners; Rebecca and her coach Elizabeth.  Rebecca runs  each  week to see Elizabeth and brings her a small present - this week she brought her a  fan because Elizabeth said she had been a bit hot the week before, at other times its been books of crosswords, cakes or newspapers.  Elizabeth says that its nice to look forward to someone coming round each  week and Rebecca says that its good to have a reason to get out of the house.  The BBC piece has generated a lot of interest in the Good Gym and we’re still going through our emails from yesterday - so we hope to get many more runners going in the next few weeks.

Wouldn’t it be good to be able to email everyone,  even those without access to the internet?  Wouldn’t it be even better if you could email them little presents that would turn up in their hands the next day?

A new service being developed by The Good Gym and Patient Opinion will do precisely this  for those with relatives in care homes.

Patient opinion has made a difference to the NHS by providing and easy mechanism for feedback, shifting the accountability of the NHS towards patients and citizens.  They have now turned their attention to care homes too.

The Good Gym was set up to provide elderly house-bound people with friendly  contact with the outside world.  We know lots of runners who like to have a mission to complete instead of running just for their own sake.

Working together, the good Gym and Patient opinion are plotting an exciting new pilot that will allow the residents of care homes to receive written letters, notes and small presents, from their friends and relatives, who will only need to write an email. The new service, the name of which is yet to be decided, will be offered to a range of a care homes in Tower Hamlets over the next month.

Residents of care homes can often be isolated and lack stimulus from the outside world.  In addition to this, Patient Opinion’s research has identified that very few care homes have internet access available to residents.  The new service will bridge the gap between a busy younger generation  and their older relatives, who  may live far away and to whom they may not get the chance to write letters.

We will be working to formalise the process over the next few months,  in the meantime,  if you have a relative in a care home in Tower Hamelts and would like to send them a message right now, send your message to mark@thegoodgym.org and we’ll have it delivered by hand by a Good Gym runner.

As our cities grow, our ability to communicate with those around us seems to be diminishing. Why is this?

A new report from Cooperatives UK looks at the demise of neighbourliness.  When I was born  in 1982, the majority of people in the UK spoke to their neighbours every day. Now, the majority of us speak to our neighbours less than once a week.

Pubs and parties are described as the best places for meeting strangers, pubs however are  losing their effectiveness - only 40% of us feel comfortable talking to strangers in pubs these days - in 1982 72% did.

The formats for our social interaction seem to be failing; our pubs and post offices (as mentioned previously on this blog), once the core of informal local social interation are failing us for various reasons.  For romantic interaction the  rise of the social acceptability and usage of dating sites seems to have addressed the failure of contemporary urban societies to find us boyfriends and girlfriends, but what are the new socially acceptable formats for friendships and neighbourly relationships?

Play is perhaps one format for interaction that we lack (if we’re not children) and which can break down barriers in neighbourhoods, but I think there are others that are equally undeveloped for adults.  The  enormous health and well-being benefits of sustained social interaction are under severe threat if the downward trend towards isolation and distrust continues in our cities.  We need to design more and better ways of incorporating friendly, caring social itneraction into what we do everyday.  The Good Gym is one attempt but we will need many more, on a much larger scale, in order to rebuild even the level  of community cohesion that we had in 1982.

Almost half of the people in Britain believe that they are getting lonelier, according to a new report from the Mental Health Foundation. On the positive side, ’social network interventions’, of which the Good Gym is one,  are cited as one of the most important ways of combating loneliness.

The report describes how loneliness is still a taboo - which makes it particularly hard to tackle because suffers are unlikely to self-refer to a organisations that might be able to help.  The slow demise of the organisations that have supported community integration, such as Post Offices and social clubs must be combatted by a larger range of organisations that allow people to causally meet and integrate without the feeling that they are there to be helped.  Though the Good Gym aims to tackle loneliness amongst the elderly, we position older people as ‘coaches’ who pass on their wisdom, rather than as passive recipients of a service.

The report can be found here.

Sporting a semi-shaven head and trademark white gloves, Ed Stevens completed the London Marathon this afternoon with a highly respectable time of 3 hours and 14 mins.  He was thrilled to have beaten his previous time by 20 minutes.  Furthermore, the Good Gym pledge has beaten its target of 20 people - which is certain to help promote The Good Gym in Tower Hamlets.

Having considered pulling out just 3 days before the Marathon, we’re really impressed that Ed was not only able to complete the 26.2 miles,  but able to do it with such style and speed.  When we caught up with him at the finish line he was composed and relaxed:

Ed: It went much better than planned… I didn’t have a fixed time plan I just wanted to beat lat year . 3.35.. I was very happy with 3.14

Ivo: That’s bloody amazing isn’t it?

E: I don’t really measure, I felt calm and listened to my body when i was tired. I didn’t drink too much lucozade like last year… and paced myself.

I:  How do you feel;

E: I feel really good now… I’m fitter than last year.  I’m glad I’m not getting on the plane tonight - but tomorrow I’ll return to Ethiopia…”

I: No pain?

E: Nothing a warm bath and some rest won’t sort out.  But considering that I was considering pulling out on Thursday because of my knee pain I’m very lucky to have finished in such a good time because it really was worrying, I didn’t get much sleep because I was thinking about pulling out.  The pain didn’t stop me.

I: We’ve reached the target with the online pledge to support you…

E: Great, I’m really pleased about that, lets hope it really picks up momentum and spreads outside Tower Hamlets… I’m so positive about the good gym because its such a simple idea and its bringing together diverse areas of life for a good cause so I’m really pleased to be able to support it today and to be part of the Good Gym

I: You’ll be in Ethiopia for 6 months. where would you like the Good Gym to be at in 6 months:

E:I’d like to see it in another London Borough,  it will grow hugely. Ok?

If you’d like to listen to the whole interview, you can download it here.  Congratulations to Ed and thanks to all that signed the pledge. To sign the pledge please go here.

This year, Ed Stevens will be running the London Marathon on behalf of The Good Gym, you can support him here.  This is his second consecutive London Marathon.  Ed has been training for the Marathon in Ethiopia where he works for Save the Children.   I asked him to say a few words about why he’s running for The Good Gym :

Ed: “Because its so directly related to  running,  more than any other i can think of… its new and innovative and I feel I was part of its early formation… I definitely think its something that will pick up momentum very fast and grow in popularity- and has a very promising future.”

Ivo: How have you been training for the Marathon?

E: “Well, i have been training for a half marathon in Ethiopia at 2500m altitude, but modify my training when my marathon place was confirmed at late notice, so I know I’m fit but haven’t trained consistently and I’m trying to keep calm before the event.  You can only run in the early mornings in Adis Ababa, its difficult to find a place where you can run on flat asphalt… you can only run in the mornings because of the pollution.”

I:What sort of time are you hoping for?

E: “I’m hoping to improve on last year, my first marathon, three hours 3.35,  considering the flight bans and possible absence of world champion athletes, I’m hoping to have a chance of a medal. Which would be an improvement of 7 thousand places!”

I:You ran for a charity last year, but the Good Gym is a Social Enterprise…

E:  “One’s not more or less worthwhile.. I don’t care how its packaged.. all stakeholders are benefiting, fitness and running is a a major part of it and its directly connected to long distance running… with a social element. The marathon is a long distance and you train intensively. The types of people who are running could give a much greater social dimension to their fitness.  This won’t appeal to everyone but we know enough from the Good Gym’s success that a lot of people are interested.”

I: What can people do to support you?

E: “Cheer me on please! look up the Good Gym and please just tell people about the project, spread the word, bring it up in conversations and particularly mention it to people who live in Tower Hamlets.”

Please sign the pledge to raise awareness of the project in Tower Hamlets and support Ed.

Running  with the Good Gym is usually done on your own, but it seems like there’s a social side of running that we’re missing out on- So we’re looking for ways that groups of runners could do good stuff together.   The sorts of things we’re excited about are things like  Jogging with John (pictured) where the runners stick around to talk about art, science and business after their runs, or even better, Run Dem Crew which is about exchanging knowledge and inspiring younger generations.  Though this is all well and good, how can we expand this idea to give the good activity some kind of physical aspect, could a group of people run somewhere and fix something, then run home again?  Perhaps we could paint a wall, clear some rubble or help someone move into a new home?  If you’ve got ideas about how a group of runners could achieve something good together, and get fit at the same time, we’d love to hear from you.

The Good Gym was asked to present the project to  an audience of South East Coast NHS improvement leads by the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement.  The event aimed to inspire and provoke innovative solutions to the problem of the aging population by using design techniques and thinking outside existing service delivery models.  Exciting ideas generated on the day ranged from working with supermarkets to offer bespoke menus to help those with specific dietary needs eat well to supporting the development of allotments and lunch clubs.  I gave a presentation telling the story of the development of the Good Gym and we had an overwhelmingly positive response; participants gave us a lot of positive feedback for the project and suggested many possible ways of connecting it into the NHS.  I hope the the model of the good gym, distributed approaches to delivering the  important social aspect of healthcare, will help to sporn other similar projects from within the NHS.   Next week  I will be meeting with an NHS representative from Tower Hamlets next week and hope to begin a discussion of how the relationship can be formalised.

Bethnal Green based social innovation hub The Young Foundation has released a new report surveying unmet need in Britain.  It identifies the ten most commonly unmet psychological needs which it argues were largely ignored during the 20th century,  amongst these are self-esteem, autonomy, relatedness and meaning or self-actualisation.   That psychological need underpins wellbeing is a key message of the study and an essential rationale behind The Good Gym:  By helping to meet the psychological needs of isolated older people (a group that the study confirms as amongst the most vulnerable to unmet needs) we aim to bolster the ability for members to satisfy their own material needs.  I hope the study, which contains a carefully balanced mixture of relevant quantitative information and sensitively written case-studies reminiscent of Michael Young’s work,  acts as a starting point for an approach to government and third sector services that addresses psychological need as an integral part of provision.