What if an important part of the answer to our community mental health challenges doesn’t lie within us… but between us?
Bringing Community Back Together, hosted by Samantha Heron, explores the growing impact of social fragmentation – from rising anxiety in young people to loneliness in older adults – and how connection across generations can be an important part of the answer.
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Through real conversations fortnightly with educators, aged care leaders, and community voices, this podcast highlights the role we all play in building meaningful engagement, belonging and stronger communities.
Episode 3: ‘Neighbourisms’ – The Pillars of a Resilient Society
Savannah Fishel, Churchill Fellow and Senior service designer facilitating systems change across health, nature and local economies works at the intersection of social connection, intergenerational and communal housing, preventative health, nature and community, service design, systems change, and tackling inequalities
In this conversation, Samantha Heron chats with Churchill Fellow Savannah Fishel, who researched 54 intergenerational and communal living communities across the US and Australia, and authored the report Beyond the White Picket Fence. Drawing on these real-world models that are already emerging, we explore what it means to move beyond individual moments of connection and begin thinking at a systems level.
This episode invites us to consider what becomes possible when we stop treating connection as a “nice to have” and start recognising it as essential to how we live.
This episode is hosted by Heart & Soul Story and supported by Good Flock. We gratefully acknowledge their support and commitment to exploring the cultural shift needed to reimagine how we live, age and belong … together.
Because building a the more connected society we need for a more sustainable world, isn’t just an idea, it’s already beginning to happen.
Join the movement encouraging a cultural shift in ageing: Good Flock.org
Connect with Savannah Fishel: thinkitforward.net
Episode 2 : Boots on the Ground
Mel Knuckey Generations Together – Tech Together, COTA Tasmania
Episode 1 : The Prime Minister Problem
We had a chat with children’s author Brenton Cullen about his beautiful, warm and deeply relevant book The Prime Minister Problem
“Old folks might feel a little left out. Lonely. So they hide away. They can seem angry or sad — but they might just want a friend.”
This is a children’s book. Yet it captures something that researchers, clinicians and community workers spend entire careers trying to articulate with the same depth. It gently points to something many of us are sensing … that as we fragment and become too ‘busy’ as a community, so too does our everyday experience of connection and belonging
Brenton Cullen writes about a boy, his grandmother, Meals on Wheels rounds, and the quiet devastation of an older person being moved far from the community that knows them.
It is a story written for children, but it is most definitely a story for all of us.
After over 7 years working on ways to increase intergenerational connection, this is the first episode of Bringing Community Back Together, and I could not have asked for a better place to begin.
