A year of Grandparents' Line
The intervention our participants rank highest is a phone call from the same person, at the same time, every week.
Migration has left a particular kind of household across rural India: an older couple, or one surviving parent, in a village where their children no longer live.
The pension arrives. The house stands. Nobody has visited in months.
What we expected to matter
Day centres, health checks, help claiming entitlements. All of those do matter, and all of them are easier to justify to a funder than what actually came top.
What actually came top
A weekly phone call from the same volunteer, at the same time.
Not a rota. Not a call centre. The same person, so that a conversation continues from one week to the next and someone notices when the answers change.
It costs almost nothing and it is the thing participants mention first.
The digital piece
Alongside the calls we set up a device and teach it — patiently, repeatedly, in the home. Teaching an eighty-year-old to video call a son in another state is not a technology outcome. It is the difference between hearing from your family monthly and daily.
Four thousand one hundred people are on the programme. Nine hundred and eighty volunteers make the calls. If you can commit to the same slot every week for a year, we would like to hear from you.
