Helen Campbell, Vice-President of AGE Platform Europe, and Age & Opportunity’s former Head of Policy and Active Citizenship, was invited in October to speak at the WHO Global Forum for Innovation for Ageing Populations in Kobe, Japan. This conference focused on what needs to be done to understand global demographic change as a positive opportunity and to emphasise equality as a core principle.

At their forthcoming General Assembly in November, AGE Platform will call for a comprehensive human rights approach in relation to policy development and service provision to older people. This mirrors the work in Ireland of the Human Rights of Older People (HROP) Working Group, of which Age & Opportunity is an active member. As part of the group’s work, Community Action Network (CAN) is working with groups of older people to explore the practical issues that those older people are facing in their lives, using a human rights ‘lens’.

The launch of the fifteenth Go for Life National Grant Scheme for Sport and Physical Activity for Older People will take place on Tuesday, 8 December 2015 at 11am in the Aleksander Hotel, Dublin 2. Minister Michael Ring from the Dept. of Transport, Tourism and Sport will announce the allocation of over 1,000 small grants to older people's groups all over the country. These grants amount to a total of €300,000 being funded by Sport Ireland to encourage and enable older people to be more active. Groups successful in their applications include Active Retirement groups, ICA groups, Men's Sheds, Family Resource Centres, sports clubs. This grant will help them to buy sport equipment and / or run all kinds of sport and physical activities throughout their communities.

On the day, the Minister will also be launching the fourth round of the research 'Physical Activity and Sport: Participation and Attitude of Older People in Ireland' undertaken jointly by Age & Opportunity's Go for Life programme and Sport Ireland.

It is important, in our work at Age & Opportunity, to go out and meet people on their own territory. A few weeks ago, Liz Harper and I were in Galway to celebrate the completion of a phase of the Touchstone project carried out by the Irish Centre for Social Gerontology in NUI Galway. Touchstone has been developed by the Active Ageing Partnership (AAP) – an initiative of Active Retirement Ireland, Age & Opportunity and Third Age, that aims to develop the skills and knowledge of people who wish to play a part in helping to make their communities more age friendly.

A large group of older people took part in an eight-week programme designed to develop their capacity and skills in being more active as citizens. It was a great success and we are looking forward to beginning a new Touchstone project with the Older People’s Network in Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown in the coming months, our colleagues in Third Age have started one in Meath and Active Retirement Ireland have started started one in Waterford.

“You can’t turn back the clock but you can wind it back up” -that’s the idea behind the Go for Life FitLine, says Mairead McLoughlin, a volunteer mentor for the telephone support service, which is aimed at people who need a little help to get more active.

Mairead has been inspiring and motivating people to get active with Fitline for the last three years.

Man, Woman and Child is a research and performance project devised and co-ordinated by Michael Fortune and Aileen Lambert featuring Irish traditional singers Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin, Máire Ní Chéilleachair, Anne Skelton, Gerry Cullen, Phil Callery and Alasdair Roberts from Scotland.

This is the third and final strand of this hugely successful and influential project which is based on The Child Ballad Collection, a collection of traditional songs published by the American collector Francis J Child in England and Scotland between 1882 and 1898. Although many of the songs, or variants of them, are sung in the Irish tradition, no comprehensive study and performance of the ballads had been undertaken in Ireland prior to this project.

Over two hundred and fifty sport and physical activity events will take place across Ireland from 7^th - 13^th of September.

A full listing of events scheduled for the European week of Sport is available on the Irish Sports Council website http://www.irishsportscouncil.ie/European-Week-of-Sport/ and everyone is encouraged and invited to get involved and participate in their local events. 

The inaugural European Week of Sport will be celebrated in 31 countries across Europe from 7-13 September 2015. 

The Week aims to promote sport and physical activity across Europe. The Week is for everyone, regardless of age, background or fitness level. With a focus on grassroots initiatives, it will inspire Europeans to #BeActive on a regular basis and create opportunities in peoples’ everyday lives to exercise more.

The Go for Life Small Grant Scheme from Age & Opportunity and the Irish Sports Council is now open!

The Small Grant Scheme is a joint initiative between Age & Opportunity’s Go for Life programme and the Irish Sports Council. Grants are available to all eligible local clubs, groups and organisations that promote increased participation in recreational sport or physical activity for older people as a main element of their activities. A total of €300,000 will be available in grants in 2015. This year grants will be between €250 and €700.

Limerick native Ainne Fawcett-Henesy was announced as recipient of Creative Writing Bursary at the University of Limerick

To celebrate its 20th anniversary, the BEALTAINE/Age & Opportunity annual festival, in association with the Creative Writing programme at University of Limerick and Listowel Writer’s Week, a scholarship was made available to applicants aged 60 plus, offering the opportunity to participate in the MA programme at UL, which is now entering its second year.  

UNIQUE TRAINING PROGRAMME TO MAKE ART GALLERIES DEMENTIA-FRIENDLY SPACES.

Are you an Irish residents over 50? Do you feel that your life illustrates our mantra that ‘Life is for Living’? Then share your story with us!

Some of the most inspirational stories will be included in a book commemorating Age & Opportunity's 25th anniversary.

It’s back (in a new form) and is popular as ever! Many thanks for all the applications that we received for this year’s Creative Exchange course. The pilot of the course, designed for activities coordinators or artists working with older people in residential and day care settings, will be delivered in seven full days over a three month period (September to December). It’s full of practical suggestions to help participantsfacilitate creative activities. Our high-quality training will also lead to FETAC Level 6 award. We are looking forward to the first session commencing on 26^th September, which is booked out! Watch this space for further courses next year!

Towards the end of the year we look into the darker aspects of living. The time of the year with darker nights was traditionally marked in the Celtic culture by the festival Samhain during which the ancestors would be called on their wisdom to help navigate through the hardships of later life.
Age & Opportunity established Samhain event as a part of its Arts & Culture programme in 2012. This contemporary form of the festival gives older people time to look where they came from and what they have learned in order to build resilience for what’s ahead.

This year’s Samhain, organised together with National Museum of Ireland and Poetry Ireland, will be held on 6^th November at the National Museum of Ireland – Archaeology (Kildare St, Dublin 2). The evening will be filled with poetry, storytelling and music. As a lead up to this event, a series of music and poetry workshops led by Elaine Agnew and Pat Boran, are scheduled for September/October.
Also a special exhibition ‘Samhain Trail’, open to the public from 1^st to 6^th November at the National Museum of Ireland – Archaeology, will be created for Samhain celebration by Cultural Companions. 

It may look like full of cold statistics report, but the numbers speak for themselves! Let’s take a closer look at the summary of this year’s Bealtaine Festival.
We are proud to announce that the number of participants has increased this year – overall an estimated 118,429 people took part in Bealtaine 2013 compared to 115,724 participants in 2012. Despite the recession 647 organisers produced 3371 events. Among them were libraries, galleries, theatres, cinemas, local arts centres etc. who presented extensive cultural programmes.
Who was talking about us this year? Bealtaine Festival was advertised in the local radio stations in the following countries: Longford, Roscommon and South Leitrim, Clare, Cavan, Monaghan and Dublin (Radio Nova and Sunshine 106fm). This local radio advertising campaign was accompanied by a national four-week poster campaign with Dublin Bus and programme distribution with Musgrave’s through Centra Network.
We received 680 single column centimeters in national newspaper coverage and 9586 single column centimeters in local/regional newspaper coverage. We were featured on radio 27 times on 18 radio stations and 4 times on 2 TV channels. Web numbers are as follows – 124 mentions on 78 websites and over 22,000 Bealtaine web views during the festival. Those web visits originated from 66 countries!

Maureen Tobin from Waterford tells us about the Ageing with Confidence Facilitators Training:
I have been working with groups of various ages, mostly around confidence building, for quite a long time now. A few years ago I did online research and I came across your course specifically aimed at older people. I have found the programmes of the training and the course very good and I wanted to apply, but life got in the way, so recently when I saw information about the training I knew that I can’t miss this opportunity again. I rang up to get more information and I was delighted to see that I didn't miss the deadline.  Now, after seeing how it looks and is being delivered I am thrilled that I got a place.
I find the course so professionally delivered by Eilish and Helen and am very pleased with its content. I am learning so much about myself and also about ageing and ageism in Ireland. The training is turning out to be more than I expected. It’s a great learning experience and I am delighted that I will be able to deliver the course to older people in the Waterford area.

The aim of the AWC facilitator-training course is to provide participants with the knowledge and skills necessary to deliver the programme to groups of older people. The training consist of 6 sessions and is being delivered by two trainers.

May belongs to creativity as we age: May belongs to Bealtaine. This year’s festival produced over 3,000 events across Ireland. Events ranged from small private events in a care setting through to big county-wide projects, producing one of the most diverse programmes on Ireland’s cultural calendar.

The month kicked off with a proclamation of protest. The Bealtaine Complaints Choir gave a one-off performance of their song of collected complaints about, among other things, economics, emigration – and the Eurovision.

Go For Life Games 2012 It’s June, the sun is out and it’s time to play! Building on the success of last year’s pilots, we at Age & Opportunity are delighted to be holding this year’s Go for Life Games on Saturday, 8 June in Dublin City University.

Teams from 14 counties will participate, competing in different leisure games. The teams involved hail from Carlow, Cork, Dublin City, Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown, South County Dublin, Fingal, Kildare, Kilkenny, Meath, Kerry, South Tipperary, Waterford, Wexford and Wicklow.

Eoghan Hanlon, freelance media professional, describes his experience of an AgeWise workshop – and an unexpected realisation. Having just finished a postgraduate course last year, he was considering how our assumptions of ‘what makes a student’ are still very age-focused. “I considered the experience of a college classmate of mine, who was in her fifties. She felt acutely aware of her own age in comparison to the rest of the class (the oldest of whom was twenty years younger), but the rest of the class just saw her as another classmate. I figured that she herself was a victim of a sort of internalised ageism... However, I then remembered an incident where the class was split into two groups for a project to produce a magazine aimed at students. At each and every stage of the project, both groups implicitly assumed that targeting students meant targeting people from their late teens to their early thirties. This was despite having a classmate in her fifties sitting in the same room. She even reinforced this attitude as she stated that she was worried that she had little to contribute to the magazine’s content due to her age!”

At Age & Opportunity, we're delighted to be involved with Socialcomputing.ie, a free website to assist people new to the internet. It's an easy-to-use index of popular Irish sites, such as newspapers, online banking and TV channels. It's particularly handy for someone who is unfamiliar with how to navigate the internet or someone who is only an occasional user, especially using a tablet computer.

Business in the Community Ireland initiated the project between Age & Opportunity, IBM volunteers, Active Retirement Ireland, Age Action, Third Age and the Older Women’s Network. Also, as part of the project, over 100 computers have also been supplied for refurbishment by other Business in the Community Ireland member companies to be given to local community groups.

With only about 40 days left until Bealtaine 2013, we are very pleased to welcome events from arts centres, libraries, groups, clubs, care settings and other organisers for inclusion on the listings. Our theme for this year is ‘Grow Happy’. John Butler Yeats, the father of poet WB Yeats, wrote in a letter that "Happiness... is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing or that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing". Bealtaine is a reminder to us that, no matter what our age, we always have the potential for growth. Come and grow happy with us!

Some highlights for us so far are the 'Complaints Choir' on 1 May which will transform the nation's moans and groans into a beautiful musical piece. 'The Man in The Woman's Shoes' is touring theatres around the country (and if I could give you one piece of advice - DO NOT MISS THIS SHOW - you'll be kicking yourself if you do). The slow craft project 'Wandering Methods' will be exhibiting in Rathfarnham Castle in Dublin from mid-May. Photographer Kate Byrne is exhibiting her work in the Highlanes Gallery in Drogheda and will be speaking about the exhibition at a special Bealtaine event in the gallery.