By Amy Davies, Head of Independent Living, Great Places

For the first part of my Churchill Fellowship, I visited an organisation called Fundación 26 de Diciembre in Madrid. They plan to open the first public care home in Spain for LGBTQ+ older people, but since 2010 have been working to increase the visibility of older LGBTQ+ people in Spain.

The organisation is named after the date that the law that criminalised being gay was changed in Spain. The law had been introduced by the Franco regime in 1970 (changing a law from 1948 against ‘Vagrants and Thugs’) and under it, many members of the LGBTQ+ community were arrested, incarcerated, received shock treatment and even tortured.

One of the reasons I wanted to carry out my Fellowship and visit other countries was to understand the differing social and historical contexts for the current older LGBTQ+ generation in each country. How recent this law change in Spain is in history, and how this impacts the current older LGBTQ+ generation, demonstrated to me the important work of Fundación 26 de Diciembre (FVD).

Spain is currently experiencing devastating flooding in Valencia, Barcelona and Murcia, and the news is full of shocking images of loss and damage, including images of older people in wheelchairs at a day centre up to their waists in flood water and stories of older people stranded in their homes without food, water, power and medication. It isn’t just older people impacted, of course, but it’s really brought home the work we do and the places of safety we create when delivering housing and care for older people.

During my visit to Madrid, I was able to meet with colleagues, volunteers and people accessing the services of FVD. It was a very informative and interesting experience, and I’m grateful to everyone that I met for taking time to meet with me and inviting me to join their meetings or activities.

Social and historical context of LGBTQ+ rights

One of the first and most important things I learned from FVD was about the challenge of delivering a groundbreaking public care home for older LGBTQ+ people within the social care structure in Spain. These challenges include opposition to the need for specific provision for this community, challenges with funding and providing a service for a specific community, challenges of meeting the needs of an ageing population and attitudes towards older people and ageing. It was fascinating to discover that those challenges are shared between the UK and Spain and has helped me to understand the focus of the remaining work of my Churchill Fellowship with France, Germany, Sweden and the USA.

Of course, laws and attitudes have changed to an extent, but the fight for equal rights for the LGBTQ+ community is by no means over, and, in some cases, we can see a shift away from progress that has been made to date. As well as understanding the historical context, my visit also emphasised the need to understand the current context in each of the places that I’ll be visiting as part of my fellowship. Colleagues from FVD explained to me that the Community of Madrid has generally always had a right-leaning local government, and the current Partido Popular lead local government partially revoked laws protecting LGBTQ+ people, specifically trans people, in 2023, supporting a motion proposed by the far-right Vox party.

Psychologically informed

During my visit, I met with a number of colleagues working across FVD, including one of the psychologists. FVD provide counselling services as part of their core offer to older LGBTQ+ people from their centre in Madrid. The colleague explained to me that this is an incredibly important part of the services they provide due to the very recent socio-historical context that I’ve described above for the older LGBTQ+ community in Spain.

As well as providing counselling services, there are a number of group activities that support this work that participants can access – for example, a group for trans people, a group for HIV+ people and a bereavement support group. The counselling services and psychologically-informed group activities work together to provide support for participants, acting as an engagement point for wider participation – for example, a person may come to a group and that leads to them accessing other services, or vice versa.

Social interaction

In addition to the services above, there’s also an extensive programme of social activities provided from the centre. These social activities are key to providing opportunities for social interaction for the participants, addressing social isolation and also providing an important link into the wider services provided by FVD.

In Spain the ‘hora de comer’ (hour of eating) is an important part of the culture and structure of daily life. To this day in Madrid, many businesses close for the ‘hora de comer’, which is often from 2pm to 4pm. Every weekday, FVD provide a meal that participants can join, which includes a starter, main course and desert. The meal is provided by a local catering company and costs €5, although there’s no charge for some people.

I was invited to join the meal one day. There were no more places available for me to enjoy the delicious food on offer, so I had to take a packed lunch (prompting a discussion about my sandwich not needing heating up and how we don’t eat our main meal at lunchtime in the UK, one of those cultural differences that leads to mutual understanding). The food served is healthy and nutritious, ensuring that people can afford to eat well, and eaten around a large table to provide companionship. After the meal, there’s also sometimes a ‘grupo de siesta’, where participants take a snooze in the comfy chairs around the centre.

This is the second time I’ve seen the tradition of eating together, participants and colleagues, as an important custom when working in Spain. Some time ago I visited an organisation called Bizitegi in Bilbao to deliver filmmaking workshops for people with experience of homelessness, and the same happened there. The ‘hora de comer’ provides an important point in the day to stop, eat well, socialise and engage with each other. I’ve been reflecting on how we can embed this principle in all of our services, but particularly at the Russell Road LGBTQ+ Extra Care scheme when it opens.

In the 2020 report, Housing, Ageing and Care, LGBT Foundation highlighted that:

“…nearly 50% of LGBT people living in social housing do not feel a sense of belonging in their local community and over 25% report felt lonely in the area they live. LGBT people may be less likely to have family who can support them in older age and many LGBT people rely on their friends or ‘chosen families’ who will age with them and may be less able to provide care and support.”

A food offer for residents is an important requirement for the commissioning of extra care schemes by Manchester City Council, but there are challenges to providing this to a large number of people with different dietary requirements or on a small scale in the current cost of living climate.

We’re looking at ways to provide a healthy food offer and opportunity for social interaction to a large number of people at Russell Road through our coproduction with the community steering group, including the design of communal spaces to deliver this in a cost-effective and innovative way. The experience of taking part in the ‘hora de comer’ at FVD has really helped me to see the value of this for everyone, with the added importance of providing this for older members of the LGBTQ+ community in particular.

Other activities on offer at FVD include a ‘digital group’, in which volunteers show participants how to use their phones or access social media or online services; an opera group (I got really excited when I heard this was on the day of one of my visits, as I’ve experience with Streetwise Opera in using opera to combat social exclusion, but this group watched opera, they don’t sing); a drama group; yoga; reading group; and English conversation group.

Volunteers

During my visit I was also fortunate to meet the colleague who oversees both the temporary accommodation that FVD provides to older LGBTQ+ people and the group of volunteers who support participants and people in the wider community, accompanying them to hospital appointments or visiting people in their care homes.

I was really fortunate to sit in on some training that the volunteers received on La Academia de Geras (The Academy of Ageing), an amazing resource created by FVD’s training department, providing information, advice and signposting on ageing well to the LGBTQ+ community. This is something that I also spoke to colleagues from the communications team about as well, where they have created a campaign to highlight to the wider LGBTQ+ community the challenges of ageing and the importance of planning for ageing well, whilst raising awareness of FVD’s work.

The volunteers also spent time planning their activities for the next couple of weeks and sharing about support they’d provided through their volunteering, in a supportive environment reminiscent of the reflective practice approach that we use in supported housing.

This training session and meeting the volunteers helped me to understand how to support people beyond those who are accessing services at the centre or from the supported housing that FVD provide. This is particularly important whilst FVD work hard to open their LGBTQ+ inclusive care home but is also something we should look to embed in both Russell Road and wider independent living services, where the knowledge and skills that we have can help to support a wider community beyond the immediate four walls of our schemes.

Reflecting on the time I spent with FVD, there’s so much more that I could write about and share, and so many lessons to take forward to my next visits as part of my Churchill Fellowship and to embed in our practice here. It was an incredible experience, and I hope to keep in touch with the people that I met, so that we can continue to share good practice and knowledge and continue to work together to improve the care and housing experience of older LGBTQ+ people.