Legacy
Legacy
Please note: this post is 81 months old and The Cares Family is no longer operational. This post is shared for information only
I’m thrilled to be joining South London Cares to lead Love Your Neighbour in Lambeth, a programme that has made a tremendously positive impact on my life over the past two years. Thanks to Love Your Neighbour I met colourful Peckhamite Margaret, and though there’s over 55 years between us, we’ve formed a close and special friendship.
Margaret and I proudly share the same patch (I call her Peckham’s princess – she single-handedly got over 1000 signatures for a petition to save the local pie and mash shop) but our experiences of living here are totally different. My life is fast-paced and sociable, but beyond going out with my friends I have no deeper connection to the place I call home. For Margaret, the opposite is true. She’s lived in Peckham all of her life, but lives alone, and rarely has anyone around for company.
Clearly older and younger neighbours like myself and Margaret, who live side by side but rarely have the opportunity to meet, have so much to gain from hanging out and helping one another in a city that – for all its progress – can be a lonely and isolating place.
Through my own experiences of Love Your Neighbour, I hope to emphasise the mutual benefit this programme brings to both older and younger neighbours. Spending time with Margaret is totally enriching, and her stories – from teenage dances on the Old Kent Road, to how awful this week’s Post Office queue was – reveal the complexity of human life in all its ups and downs.
London, though vibrant and progressive, is a place of extreme divides: social, economic, generational, and more - so meeting my older neighbours whose age, life experiences, and views differ from own, has made my city a more colourful, complex and interesting place. I’m so excited to introduce my older and younger neighbours in Lambeth, and show that people from across perceived divides have so much to gain from each other.