Click against loneliness (2023)

At the beginning of 2023, the organization Esplai Foundation for Committed Citizenship, which has been working since 1999 for the social inclusion of vulnerable groups, initiated a collaboration with the research group ECIGAL of the University of A Coruña, which is dedicated to promoting and researching the Education for Global Citizenship (ECG) and other critical and transformative educations. As part of the project funded by the Xunta de Galicia "Click against loneliness", Fundación Esplai and ECIGAL work together to carry out research based on participatory principles. With older adults, we investigated how to create informal support networks through Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as a way of preventing and tackling loneliness, a particularly worrying trend among people in this age group.

We wanted to place older people at the center of this research, not only by taking their demands into account, but also by allowing them to act in decision-making during the research process, as well as in the design of actions to be reflected in a final report. It was an essential element for this project to generate spaces for debate on these issues, with the involvement of older people and social agents. For this reason, we constructed an advisory group that accompanied us throughout the research.

The results are published in Spanish on the Esplai website, and we also provide here an English language PPT presentation that summarizes main findings.