On Thursday 17th January, SIS was invited to meet Minister for Faith, Lord Nick Bourne at the Brighton and Hove Impetus offices.
At the meeting Impetus staff and volunteers introduced two schemes for which SIS is a partner.
The Neighbourhood Care Scheme encouraging and enabling people from language communities to become volunteers for, or recipients of, a service which matches up lonely and isolated individuals with a “friend” who can visit regularly. A service recipient at the meeting spoke very movingly about the “unexpected and excruciating pain of loneliness” and how she had felt “condemned to life” until the NCS volunteer had transformed her existence by providing “someone to tell”. SIS talked about our two Service User Days and the role of faith groups in reach out the most vulnerable individuals.
Community Navigation Plus works to expand the existing social prescribing service to reach people with the poorest health outcomes – BME, travellers and Trans individuals. SIS was able to talk about the issues facing our service users, how we are able to help through our Volunteer Linguist Project and Bilingual Community Navigation.