Life saving Preston charity combatting loneliness epidemic by offering company, activities, and a cup of tea

Renew Fulwood, which has been holding sessions at St Cuthbert’s church in Preston every Monday morning for just over a year, regularly regularly welcomes over 40 people, using a café-style space to provide activities and refreshments for attendees.

The group is part of the Renew Wellbeing organisation founded by Ruth Rice in Nottingham in 2015 with the aim of helping churches to create spaces to help combat isolation and promote wellbeing. Having experienced exponential growth since, there are now over 250 Renew spaces all over the UK providing training and weekly help and advice to volunteers.

“Renew came out of time when we came out of Covid and the church had this vision of being able to provide a community space for local people," said Gwen Moorby, who has been volunteering with Renew since it opened in October 2022. "We had a really nice space and that’s what we thought we could use and that’s when we came across a woman called Ruth Rice who had a charity that was all about renew wellbeing."

Offering a range of activities such as jigsaws, knitting, and board games as well as a separate quiet space and refreshments from biscuits to bacon butties, the charity is run by members of the church who have received training from Renew Wellbeing.

“We did local mail drops and from that we got five or six people,” Gwen said, with Renew also providing support space for carers of elderly relatives and those suffering from early signs of dementia and occasionally refugees and asylum seekers. “Since then it’s simply just grown, we’ve got people from church who come along, people from the local community, we tend to get new people every week.

"The one thing we’ve noticed is that we provide this space for people to really come along and enjoy company,” Gwen added. “As people get older, they lose their friends and they lose their partners there is this problem with loneliness. We get people who say they don’t know what they would’ve done with themselves, it’s been really great.”