PR 00168 - Explore

What is the problem/issue you are trying to address?

Food condition of elderly inhabitants of Cadzand village, loneliness, whish of touristic entrepreneurs to provide services year round.

Pilot aim

What is it and how did you arrive at it?

Improve the quality of food consumed by the elderly in Cadzand village while at the same time providing local businesses with new opportunity’s, to also help to overcome the strong seasonal variations that restaurants have to grapple with and using the regional strategy food Zeeland as a food region.

Stakeholders on your pilot

People and organisations represented, number of stakeholder meetings and total number of people at each stakeholder meeting.

• Interviewing a lot of stakeholders separately: inhabitants, entrepreneurs, tourists (logbook).

• We invest in contacts with the village council of Cadzand and the local social club for elderly people (by several conversation and by visiting local activities and events for local elderly like an event social music event for specific elderly people of Cadzand on 1 September 2017
• We took part in several regional and provincial meetings about health and tourism (Contacta, DVR Kick off etcera).
• We organized a meeting with inhabitants of Cadzand and Retranchement about living active and independent longer.
• On Provincial level Impuls participates in a core group concerning healthy province Zeeland. The participation strengthens the support for the project SAIL and imbedding in local structures and existing projects.
• We dispersed a questionnaire to elderly inhabitants from the age 55+ to gather data about the current situation on movements/ sports/ activities/ nutrition/ wellbeing and their social network
• In July 2017 GGD Zeeland and Impuls interviewed several tourists of Cadzand-Bad and asked them about their wishes in relation to current products and services and their wishes for the future.
• Organisation lunch for elderly inhabitants on 20 September 2017 talking about three issues: nutrition, movement & sport, Loneliness & wellbeing (11 inhabitants).

• Organisation stakeholders meeting on 24 October 2017, collecting ideas for the pilots based on the collected needs of inhabitants, tourists and second residents (33 participants).
• To get more insight in the developments within the food sector on regional and cross border we visited a couple of organizations specialized within Food sector:

• • Community garden in Groede where local people/restaurant owners can buy a subscription to harvest their fresh vegetables.
  • Belgium university which has a research group on the topic elderly and nutrition.
  • Entrepreneur in Cadzand-Bad who has an idea for a mobile food kiosk in combination with a dune garden.
  • Food estate agent of the province.
  • Municipality officials of the community of Sluis about the opportunities of the Food region Sluis.

Pilot beneficiaries

Who will benefit from this pilot? What is the goal that you are trying to achieve with this pilot?

• Local elderly inhabitants of Cadzand village.
• Lonely elderly inhabitants of Cadzand village.
• Local entrepreneurs (Cadzand village/Cadzand-Bad)
• Elderly second residents and visitors (Cadzand)

The goal is to develop new business or service models that contribute to active and healthy ageing as well as the local economy

Ideas generated

What ideas were generated from your stakeholder meetings?

We collected a list of 16 clusters of ideas during the stakeholders meeting. Below you find a summery of the clusters. Ideas Food Chain Cadzand.

1.    Organisation of small events/ happenings (f.e. food festival or picknick)

2.    Realisation connecting ‘Experience’-path between Cadzand village and Cadzand-Bad

3.    Using the dune-garden with local vegetables and herbs

4.    Fresh food market with local products

5.    Health tourism

6.    Mobile Food/drink kiosk

7.    Eat (and Cook) together

8.    Shopping for daily living in relation to mobility

9.    Social agent to connect people

10.  Socialisation by movement

11.  Lecture on local wisdom for young and elderly people

12.  Using the opportunities of the village house Cadzand

13.  Increasing digital skills of elderly people

14.  Linking elderly people to young ones

15.  Linking elderly people to tourists/ visitors

16.  Deploy elderly people in the touristic sector for staff shortage

Values for selection

Based on the information collected at the stakeholders meetings and other interviews or conversations held in the location, what are important underlying values for your project? Such as valuing the opinions of your users or needing your project to be cost neutral at this stage for some of your partners?

We have a list of values we collected during our interviews and meetings:

• Safety (not going out when its dark outside)
• Social Safety
• Independence (doing what you want)
• Social network
• Meet people and be together (eating together)
• Cosiness (being together and doing things together)
• Freedom (planning your own daily activities)
• [ Be active (mainly for the younger < 70 years)]

• Creativity
• Traditional/ conservative (little readiness to change)
• Sobriety
• Difficulty asking for help
• Livibility dorp Cadzand (hardly any services and facilities available to meet eachother)
• Fellow humanity (looking after each other)
• Involvement
• Connection with your roots

Acceptability

How did the project team, other organisations and your participants react to the project idea? What is the level of involvement/commitment from each group at this stage? Evidence could include: participant observation at initial project meetings and the reflections of the project group.

How did the project team, other organisations and your participants react to the project idea? What is the level of involvement/commitment from each group at this stage? Evidence could include: participant observation at initial project meetings and the reflections of the project group. The inhabitants are enthusiastic about the ideas mentioned in the stakeholders meetings. They are looking forward to have more opportunities to meet each other.

The entrepreneurs seems to be willing to organize something for the local inhabitants. We have good connections with the entrepreneurs. We have good commitment/collaboration from and with the village council and the social elderly club. Representing the inhabitants.

Engaging tourists and second home residents is very difficult. This is due to the fact that second home residents are not permanently present and are difficult to locate and thereby to reach them. It is also difficult to engage tourists. They are on holiday and for entrepreneurs it is uncomfortable to ask their guest for an interview.

Westtoer in Ostend experienced the same difficulty in reaching second home residents.

Our buddys in Norfolk subscribed our way of of working starting by talking to villagers is something which has not happened in Dementia Friendly Walks (DFW) as Norfolk already had a potential DFW walks concept which they are adapting for new organisations and user groups.  This “bottom up” approach is something which Norfolk can learn from and will use in the next work package when testing their pilot.

From our side the combination of walking and food could be interesting for Cadzand. We can learn from the things our buddys in Norfolk had to keep in mind organizing Dementia Friendly Walks. It will be the same for walks or activities for elderly people. Like availability of (public) toilets, enough parking space, benches etc. accessibility for wheelchair is not the same as the accessibility for people with dementia. A pretest with the target group is preferable. We can do that also in pilot Healthy food chain.

Demand

What is the demand for your project? How do you know this, what information did you use to help you?

The demand for the project is that inhabitants feel the need to have more opportunities to meet each other (social interaction)/combatting loneliness. We try to connect this with healthy eating and local food. We know this by speaking to the inhabitants en reflecting with them the different ideas collected during the stakeholders meetings.

Implementation/Practicality/Organisational/Financial Feasibility

How feasible does your project look to your team at this stage in terms of practicality, and financial feasibility?

Financial feasibility for the pilots is a problem at this moment. We don't have money for pilots and spent a lot of time trying to find money to run the pilots.

Financial feasibility in the future we are working on f.e. by working very close together with the city council (witch can request for finance for local activities at the municipality). We also try to connect close with the welfare department of Sluis. We have some difficulties doing that because of retiring of the welfare contact person of Cadzand and the change of persons during this period.

Additional assets and resources

Do you need any additional assets or resources including expertise to help you deliver your project?

For the implementation we need for example a foodexpert of Zeeland and a better connection with the regional strategy for Zeeland as Food Regio.

In addition we need some pilot budget to try and test the pilotideas, because at this moment there is no economic business case yet.

Adaptation

Have you made any changes to your original plans, why did you make the change and what information did you base your new plans on? For instance any changes you made to the context, format, timing, setting or population at this stage?

It looks like most of the elderly people in Cadzand village eat healthy, (they say they do so) they cook by themselves and they say they cook with fresh products. So there seems not to be a real problem of eating unhealthy, but it is difficult to estimate in which way people really eat healthy. Based on the health monitor in Zeeland (Zeelandscan 2016) 61% of the elderly (65+) in the community of Sluis suffers from (severe) obesity and 33% of the people living in Cadzand/Groede/Nieuwvliet/Breskens does not drink sufficiently (Zeelandscan 2016). Loneliness seems more a problem and people say they would like to have more opportunities to eat together (social interaction).

Integration

Do you think this project will work within the current local setting/structures? What changes need to be made to integrate your new project into existing infrastructure or programs?

We have to secure the activities in local structures like the city council/social club for elderly and preferable the connection with the community welfare organisation.

Selected ideas for next phase

Based on the areas stated above, which ideas from your meetings have b een selected for the phase of design and develop on SAIL?

1 Eating and drinking together

2 Organizing small scale food events