Word soon spreads about friendship lunches
EACH DAY this week we will look back to a memorable story from the last five years of the Yorkshire Post’s Loneliness: The Hidden Epidemic campaign, starting with friendship lunches.
IT WAS a simple idea – that good food and good company could be used to tackle the isolation they had read about in the pages of this newspaper.
Michael and Sasha Ibbotson, landlords of the Durham Ox in Crayke, were inspired by
The Yorkshire Post’s loneliness campaign to found their friendship lunches in February 2015.
Back then, Mr Ibbotson said he hoped the lunches, where anyone could come along and join a shared table, would be “a doorstep to friendship”, and over the coming years, his dream was realised, with hundreds of people attending the meals.
Coming at a time when rural communities were faced with an increasing number of village shops and services closing, the initiative was backed by Age UK North Yorkshire, parish councils, care associations and churches.
The lunches were such a success that six other nearby North Yorkshire pubs and hotels soon followed suit, setting up their own lunches, and in July 2016, were picked up by care worker and Rotarian Kathy Markwick in South Yorkshire.
Mrs Markwick began with an event in Dodworth, and she soon founded meals across Barnsley, Sheffield and Rotherham, with support from her employers Home Instead Senior Care.
Speaking at the launch of the first lunch, Mrs Markwick said: “The friendship lunches in North Yorkshire seemed to be having a huge and positive impact on the growing problem of loneliness, and I thought it would be wonderful to do something similar in South Yorkshire.”