Lifeworks approached Cosmic in response to the Covid-19 lockdown, looking for a technology solution that could provide essential support and a community-hub for their beneficiaries.
Lifeworks support around 250 children, young people and adults with learning disabilities to have great lives. They have residential and short break social care services, specialist further education, and lots of community projects with their young people leading the way. From the outset of the Covid-19 crisis, this community of people fell into sudden isolation. Lifeworks’ Community Projects were unable able to offer support through their usual services.
To bring together the socially isolated young people who were struggling to understand life without their friends, we developed Safe Space: a closed social platform. This allows for the Lifeworks young people to get together online in a protected space that will be open for certain hours of the day and moderated. It is a light-touch approach to allow the young people the freedom to post and share within a safe online environment. They have events publicised, topics to learn from and videos to watch, all while being able to comment about everything and chat to each other. For these individuals, it has been a lifeline.
Cosmic were flexible in meeting the requirements as they grew and changed by being agile and listening to the client’s needs. We have trained Lifeworks moderators and site editors to enable them to get the most from the platform. We have also developed the platform to include group live chat.
The young people feel like they are part of their peer group again and able to share things in a low risk, closed platform.
From the public perspective this service is delivered behind closed doors and so is not a normal public facing website.
We are very proud of our work with Lifeworks and, as it grows, it will be able to deliver online interaction to replace face-to-face social contact during the pandemic and allow for online delivery into the future.