Home Sharing and Intergenerational Communities

This evening explores how older people and younger people could live together in a mutually beneficial solution to two problems. The first is that researchers have found an “epidemic of loneliness” in older people. As Katie Hafner writes “Researchers have found mounting evidence linking loneliness to physical illness and to functional and cognitive decline.”
The second problem is that people in the 18-30 age range are finding it increasingly difficult to find affordable places to live and landlords are increasingly reluctant to rent houses for multiple sharers. Shared living is an obvious solution and we have identified several practical ways to encourage this.
Our guest speaker, Audrey Heard , founder of Homeshare West, will give a talk about how their model works, which matches older people with rooms to spare with people who need housing.
We will also discuss the related idea of forming custom made intergenerational communities within a single house. We aim that from this evening a group will develop to create a network to implement several strategies for home sharing in Frome.