The number of older people across Europe is increasing. New active ageing initiatives are emerging to empower older people as active citizens. SLIC is one such project funded by the Lifelong Learning Programme of the European Commission. It has started in November 2007 and ran until January 2010.
Aims of SLIC
The aims were to develop new, practical ways to help older adults review their past experience and personal skills and to explore new and potential opportunities fo learning and community engagement. This was achieved through developing an innovative workshop model which is set out in the handbook. SLIC was coordinated by the Austrian Red Cross. Nine organisations from six European countries - Austria, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy and the United Kingdom - participated in the SLIC-project.
The SLIC-leaflet provides a short summary about the project results.
Workshops
The workshops were implemented and tested with 103 older learners participating from 6 countries. It worked well with groups of volunteers coming from established programmes and with other groups of participants identified as potential community champions. Older people not previously engaged in learning or volunteering buth who were looking for new activities and older people from local ethnic minority communities all successfully took part in the workshops. The workshops are particularly useful wehn inserted in a longer-term programme on training or community engagement for older people. An ideal group size is 10-15 participants.
Handbook
The handbook gives a short overview of the background to the SLIC-project and how the workshops were developed. it also provides details on how to run the SLIC-workshops and highlights tools that can be used. The handbook not only targets professionals working in this field, but it also addresses older champions who would like to run SLIC-workshops themselves. The handbook is available in 5 languages: English, German, Finnish, Hungarian and Italian.
