The housing estates being built in the Diocese of Oxford have never had post offices.  Known as new communities (euphemistically perhaps), they don’t even have post boxes at first.  Most don’t have pubs, shops, community centres, doctors’ surgeries or schools either.

Research has shown that when people have spaces in which to meet, friendships and social networks are sustained. People living in Manhattan, New York, for example, experience it as an urban village even though half of them live in lone households. This is because there are cafés and alternative places to hang out.[3] When people have nowhere to go, they experience a void rather than a heart. There’s a sense of isolation that generates a particular kind of feeling alone.

And these places in which people are vulnerable to loneliness, are being built right across the wider Thames Valley. In the Oxford Diocese, there are 38 new communities being created in ten Oxford deaneries affecting 48 parishes. Bicester will double in size, so will Aylesbury. Milton Keynes will get considerably larger.[4]

The role of the church combating loneliness in new communities

Within these estates, the church has a significant role to play. “Developers build houses, but churches seek to engage communities,” says Peter Morgan, New Communities Development Officer, Diocese of Oxford. By moving in, baking cakes as welcome gifts, writing newsletters, holding street parties and setting up mother and toddler groups, the church can help create places where people can flourish.

It can also act as a bridge between the developers and those who live on the estate. Developers have to provide schools and community centres but not before people have moved in and not necessarily in the way they need. There is a role for the church in forming relationships with planners and builders to help ensure the appropriate community facilities are written into plans and delivered on time. “There is no other resource on the estate,” said Captain John Bentley, New Community Minister, Kingsmere, Bicester. “We have created a means by which people can find out what’s happening, where to go and be a community.”

[1] The Network Change Programme was announced by the UK Government in May 2007 in response to declining use of post offices which was leading to unplanned closure of branches.

[2] Post Office Closures: Impact of the Network Change Programme, Consumer Focus Wales (2010)

[3] Weiss,  R. Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation Cambridge. MA: The MIT Press (1975)

[4] New Communities Group, Summary of Large-Scale Housing Development, Diocese of Oxford (2015)

The role of Facebook in developing new communities

Pros

• A residents Facebook page can be a way of letting people know about activities. A survey in Great Western Park showed it was far more effective than newsletters or word of mouth.
• Residents can use the page as a way of sharing information and advice.
• Many residents find Facebook a natural way to find others on the estate and suggest meeting up.
• A Facebook page can be used to conduct surveys on residents’ hopes and experience of facilities which can be used as data to present to developers.

Cons

• Not all estates have the broadband infrastructure meaning some residents can’t easily get online.
• Sometimes residents use Facebook to communicate where a face-to-face conversation would work better – such as complaining about the way a neighbour has parked a car.

Fact file on new communities in the Diocese of Oxford

• There is pressure on government to build houses. In 2004, the Barker Report recommended building 245,000 private sector homes per year.[1] This target has never been met. In England, 118,760 homes were completed in the 12 months to December 2014, which is 8 per cent higher than the previous year.[2]
• The wider Oxford Diocese is a popular place to live because it offers employment. For example, the Thames Valley, Berkshire is the most profitable part of the country aside from London. It has the fourth highest proportion of adults educated to degree level or above and the fifth lowest unemployment rates in the UK.[3]
• Between 2001 and 2011, parts of the Oxford Diocese had some of the largest population increases in the country – Milton Keynes (17 per cent), Slough (16.3 per cent), Oxford (12.1 per cent). By comparison the population across the whole of England and Wales increased by just 7 per cent.[4]
• It’s estimated that between 2015 and 2020, the population of Slough will have increased by 14.7 per cent, West Berkshire by 7.9 per cent, Reading by 6.4 per cent and Alyesbury Vale by 5.4 per cent. By 2030, the population of Slough will have increased by 35. 3 per cent, West Berkshire by 22 per cent, Reading by 18.8 per cent and Alyesbury Vale by 14.7 per cent. [5]

[1] Barker K, Review of Housing Supply Final Report – Recommendations Delivering Stability: Securing our Future Housing Needs: HM Treasury (2004)

[2] House Building: December Quarter 2014, England: Department for Communities and Local Government (2015)

[3] Housing Supply: Opportunities for Economic Growth: Barton Willmore p3 (2013)

[4]  Population and Household Estimates for England and Wales: Office for National Statistics (2012)

[5] Subnational Population Projections, 2012-based projection: Office for National Statistics (2014)

This is the fifth of a series of posts on loneliness. It is based on Loneliness Accident or Injustice by Jo Ind, a joint publication from the Diocese of Oxford (Board of Mission) and the Archway Foundation.

Google launched its Digital Garage in our beautiful library today.  It’s aim is to help small businesses in Birmingham grow through their use of the web.

So if you fancy a one-to-one session with a Google “technician”, you can step into a pod and have a chat about your digital issue .

And you can go to a seminar to hear advice from a Google guru on telling your story digitally or reaching more customers online.

And it’s all free.

What’s not to like? At the launch there were jellybeans and lollipops too.

• Book a one-to-one session
• Book a place on a training seminar

• Evelina London Children’s Healthcare (through my contract with Digital Life Sciences)
• Birmingham Children’s Hospital (through my contract with Maverick Television)

Both jobs involved doing workshops and interviews with children, play therapists, psychologists, doctors, nurses, allied health professionals and support staff and then using that information to create the style and voice of the website’s content.

I have gone through similar processes to make digital content for adults – West Midlands Academic Health Science Network, HEWM Learning,  Modality Partnership, NHS local – but, though I have enjoyed it, it has not made my heart sing in quite the same way.

When I make content for children, I have a child continually in my mind.  Going to work, turning on my computer, travelling, meeting, grafting…I am holding the needs of children in my heart.

For some reason, this makes me happy.  Children are the best clients.

And then the electrician turned our solar system on. I looked at our control panel and there it was – we were already exporting electricity to the national grid.

What can explain my excitement?  It was partly that we were making money, just as we sat there.  But the greater sense of wellbeing was in the knowledge that it was all coming from the glorious, never-to-be-depleted sun.

It was six years ago the Chartered Management Institute produced a report  Management Futures – The World in 2018 which claimed that rather than balancing work and home demands, by 2018 we will be weaving the two together.

More recently Mashable has been asking if work-life integration is the new norm and Harvard Business Review has considered what successful work-life integration looks like.

Work-life integration

To me work-life integration looks like doing my supermarket shopping in five minutes while waiting for a meeting at work to begin. It’s picking up an email from the office while standing in the school playground. It’s saying to a colleague: “Let me share this document with you so you can work on it tomorrow at home.”

It means the boundaries between my paid work and the rest of my life are less rigid than they were before Google was a map, a calendar, a filing system, a note book and an address book as well as a store, a video channel and a search engine.

Where I once restricted work to work, I can now nip into work while watching telly, lounging by a hotel pool or crawling through a tunnel in a soft play centre.

Do I want my work and life to be integrated?

I CAN do these things.  But is it a good thing to do?  Do I want to? For me the answer is about the extent to which the integration is within my control.

For the most part Google and its suite of tools have greatly enhanced my life.  Being able to glance at work emails when I’m not in the office makes working part-time considerably easier. I don’t have to respond to emails if I don’t want to, but I can pick up on important things, if do.

And because I am only ever a click away, I can leave the office to see my son star as Joseph in his school nativity play or care for him when he is ill.  It’s a win-win situation.  Everyone gains.

Google calendar makes it possible

Apart from the capability of picking up emails anywhere, the tool I find most useful in leading an integrated life is Google calendar.

I remember the days, not so long ago, when, if I was trying to organise a get-together with a friend, she had to go home to look at her calendar before we could arrange anything.  She and her husband kept a calendar in their kitchen, so they could see what the other was doing. This was fine – unless she was at work, in the pub or anywhere else when she needed to make an arrangement. How she needed Google calendar!

I now have a Google calendar for home and one for work. I have one for my husband and one for my son and I can access the calendars of whoever gives me permission in the office.

This functionality is invaluable to anyone who aspires to lead an integrated life. If I need to arrange a doctor’s appointment, I can click into my work calendar, my home calendar and my son’s to find a space when all are free. And I can do this wherever I am – from my phone, from the office or from my desk top computer at home.

I can turn the calendars off

But the real beauty of Google calendar is that I can turn the calendars off.  I don’t share my home calendar with anyone outside the family. And when I’m at home or on holiday, I can tag a box which means my work calendar is not longer in my view.

Sometimes I need to see my personal and professional arrangements together. Sometime I want to separate the two.  The beauty of Google calendar is that I can integrate or not, depending on what my needs are at the time.

Google calendar is not just a tool for work-life integration.  It’s a metaphor for it too.

It’s not wonky in real life – that’s down to the photographer’s skill and creativity.

Since February I’ve been working for Maverick Television, the company that brought us Embarassing Bodies and How to Look Good Naked, to make a ground-breaking website for the NHS in the West Midlands.

We’ve still got a little way to go to be where we want to be but the password of NHS local was lifted yesterday.

(I also had an ankle injury and had to take my child out of nursery but that’s not the point of this post. The point is to find a way of smiling like a Buddhist cat amidst that particular frustration that could not have existed before the internet was invented.)

This is what I said to myself:

1) Don’t take it personally

Some of us (mainly women?) see a techy failure as evidence that we are stupid cows, which is the biggest block to finding a solution that there is. You are not stupid. You are a smart person trying to figure it out. That’s all.

2) Take baby steps

We could spend the rest of our lives learning about computers, servers, hosts, SEO, POP3 and HTML code and we still wouldn’t know everything there is to know. Feeling overwhelmed is another block in learning. Don’t try to learn everything or even a lot. Take baby steps. Take one a day. You’ll be canny before you know it.

3) Remember you are not alone

Mentally identify the people who can help you. There are probably more than you think. Share yourself between them, so you aren’t asking the same person all the time. It often helps to type your question into Google and see what comes up  – though you don’t want to know that when NOT BEING ABLE TO GET ON THE NET IS WHAT YOU DARN WELL CAN’T DO IN THE FIRST PLACE.

4) See this as an opportunity to learn

When something gets sorted out, make sure you understand what went wrong. Then you can congratulate yourself on having taken five baby steps before you even got to the end of the week.

5) Question why we expect it to be effort-free

If we see a beautiful garden, we appreciate people have spent years on their knees, breaking their backs and washing the soil from their fingernails. If folks are using technology in a nifty way, we just assume they’re clever geeks rather than imagine the thought, the times they were foxed and the hours spent watching little green bars move across a computer screen.

6) Enjoy the change of rhythm

There comes a point, when you are ill, when you have to abandon your plans for the day and accept you can’t do anything so you may as well enjoy spending time with your duvet. View technological failures in the same way. Accept you as can’t be as productive as you had planned so find something else to enjoy in the hiatus.

And with that wise advice to myself I wafted through my week on a jasmine-scented cloud….. That woman who lost it while on the phone to Virgin Media. It wasn’t me. Oh no.