Reconnect generations
Help us to reconnect generations with each other while guaranteeing trust and benevolence between people
Description
Challenge
We are looking for a solution that locally recreates social cohesion between generations that have been weakening in Western societies over the past decades and more especially targeting populations that are isolated due to age, dependency or disability. Plus this solution will have to guarantee trust to caregivers without being help nor medicalised.
The
evolution of modern Western societies and retirement pensions appearing after
Second Word War led generations to be freer one to another. In France, the country that interests us for
this challenge, it has become very rare to encounter three generations of a
same family living under the same roof.
This
situation has advantages but disadvantages too. Grand-parents when retired are
not here anymore to take care of the little ones which leads to many parents’
common issue of baby sitting and day care. Growing old and dependency
appearing, grandparents are very often isolated, active and working parents not
living in the same place cannot take care of their own parents and when the
case logistics may be very difficult.
In France 11 million people are caregivers of a family member and 77% out of them do not use professional home help. Those people tend to be exhausted and at the fringe of nervous breakdown. Caregivers need time off.
It is observed that society is cut in two parts of people: people who are well and enjoy life and the other ones, invisible, who are dependent, disabled or old and who result to be on the fringe of society. Those two parts are disconnected. The solution will aim at reconnecting those two parts of society and implicating all kind of people and generations.
It
has been the goal of many associations over a long time but their actions have
been local and the French state has been reducing its subsidies to associations
over the past years due to French economic stagnancy. For more coherence and
then more impact nationwide, the solution will need a national scale.
French tax laws encourage people to consume home help services and this trend may be reinforced by new French President Macron.
CONTEXT
Location: Angers, Loire Valley, France - Angers urban area is over 150,000 inhabitants.
Angers has been a panel city for more than 20 years and is the place in France where many products are tested before being distributed on the market, for large retailers in particular.
The
target beneficiaries of the solution are mainly people over 75 living alone in cities
over 100,000 inhabitants. 27% out of over 85 year-old live alone in cities over
100,000 inhabitants.
Accord
to Insee, French institute for statistics, in France, there are 274,874 people
over 75 living alone.
As
described in section 1, the main users of the future solution are caregivers of
their family members as they are purchasing advisors, Internet users and
younger: they are between 30 and 55. The majority of people over 75 do not use
the Internet.
Those two profiles of users of the future solution are the ones who pay for leisure time. The other profile of users of the future solution are the ones who offer a service of leisure. The latter are young men and women living in cities who are students aged between 20 and 24.
the challenge owner
Angers Smart City Platform wants to support exemplary projects, mixing social link, intergenerational exchanges with loT & WebApps.
The founding members of the association comprise 3 colleges: academic, institutional and business colleges. The association promotes collaborative work, the networking of digital actors, training, as well as exchanges and valorisation of innovative projects that are contributing to the purpose of the association. It relies on technical resources made available to its members and aimed at building the technical and operational platform as well as supporting experiments.
This project will particularly benefit from the resources of the Silver Economy network, our relations with residential service managers ... We will share success stories in order to provide concrete solutions, essential to the success of the experiment.
Innovation
The elected
project will offer a very differentiating and innovating value proposition to
users.
Home help associations and private companies do exist and offer strict care services without specifically meeting the expectations of connection between generations and the need of social cohesion of their customers. Experiences are scarcely scalable nationwide nor European wide.
We are looking for a peer-to-peer marketplace that will promote trust and mutual benevolence beyond mere care services thanks to a few process innovations:
- It will have to properly validate the peers applying to participate in the action thanks to personal profiles and motivations in compliance with a charter of values
- It will have to match people from different generations according to social and cultural criteria that will help create real connections between people.
- A one-stop service from people matching to payment functionalities, which is easily scalable nationwide. As far as we know, there is no such solution that exists in the Loire valley nor nationwide.