The Hive celebrate Intergenerational Week with postbox of kindness

The Hive have taken part in Intergenerational Week by introducing a postbox of kindness to their cafe.

Intergenerational week takes place from the 25th of April to the 1st of May and was originally founded in Ireland. During this week young people get together to try and be more inclusive for the older generation. Each day has a different mission for anyone to take part in.

Nicola Yeates from The Hive said: “It’s basically getting all the generations together, the older generation and the younger generation.

“So it works the other way where they’re asking the elderly generation to tell stories about their past.”

The postbox was implimented for people to come and draw pictures, write poems or letters. The Hive will then take it to Fountains, a local care home, for residents to read and look at.

The Hive are targeting their ‘BeeCreative’ group which meets every Friday to help provide some of these messages and pictures.

The postbox is there until the 1st of May, and then the volunteers of The Hive will distribute the contents to the residents in a way they see as fair.

“The older generation are still quite isolated, because they might be too scared to come outside.” Nicola stated. ” It’s nice to be able to put this back to them.”

With the different spread of events that the cafe hosts there is a big age range of the people who attend these events, while some do tend to be more suited to a younger or older community, such as the vetrans lunch or the knit and knatter group, Nicola still explained that there can be people from age 25 to 75 that will attend the events that they put on or come in for a cup of tea.

Nicola explained how something as simple as not understanding technology is a form of exclusion, which the charity combat with their ‘Learn my Way’ group. They help elderly residents of the community learn what they feel they need to. This includes understanding how to operate a computer or set up an online account. Their aim is to take away as much exclusion for the older generation as possible.

The group are asking anyone with some spare time to visit The Hive and write a letter or draw a picture to brighten up someone’s day and give back to the community that came before us.