Advocacy

As a central hub for the sector, Flourishing Lives helps to unify the collective knowledge and expertise of providers and practitioners, and amplify the voices of older people.

We bring individuals and organisations together from across the sector to form a powerful and effective lobbying group for the benefit of older people.

As a network ranging from individuals with lived experience to organisations with a global reach, front-line workers to policy-makers, artists to clinicians, and social innovators across the arts, public and voluntary sectors, the coalition has accrued a vast wealth of expertise that is now being sought out for consultation by organisations keen to emulate our working practices.

By reflecting and promoting this collective knowledge, the Flourishing Lives coalition is now widely recognized as exemplars of best practice and a pioneering advocacy group for excellence in service provision for older people.

We have consulted in the development of a number of transformation projects in older people’s services over the past five years, offering advice and access to our collective knowledge base to organisations including Jewish Care, Nightingale Hammerson, and Connect Hackney as they strove to evolve their programmes to a more relational model, presenting them with successful case studies and toolkits for best practice.

We delivered a creative ageing presentation in 2018 alongside the British Council to arts and health delegates from China, Taiwan and South Korea, exploring ways in which the Flourishing Lives coalition model can be adapted and implemented in North East Asia.

We represented the UK at the inaugural ‘High-Level Forum on the Silver Economy’ in Helsinki in July 2019, convened by the Finnish government and the Global Coalition on Aging for government and business leaders. The Forum brought together leaders in government, business, academia and non-governmental organizations from nearly 50 countries around the world, with 60 expert speakers, 600 high-level attendees, and 4000 viewers of the live webcasts, sharing best practice and advocating for the benefits of engaging older people in high-quality aspirational arts provision, as exemplified by the Flourishing Lives coalition.

We are founding members of the Reimagining Dementia coalition, an international group of dementia activists and allies campaigning for culture change in dementia care. The coalition was formed in 2020 in partnership with the East Side Institute in New York. We have delivered six international gatherings to date, convening 200 practitioners and people with lived experience as we develop a campaign calling for a more relational approach to dementia care.