The Blog

Most of us know, without thinking too hard about it, that care homes can be lonely places. We know it the way we know other uncomfortable truths: clearly enough to feel slightly uneasy, not quite clearly enough to do anything about it. We visit when we should, we leave when we can, and we carry a faint guilt about the gap between the two.

A retirement home in Deventer, a quiet river town in the Netherlands, decided that was not good enough.

The home is called Humanitas. Several years ago its director, Gea Sijpkes, made an offer to local university students struggling to find affordable housing in a country where rents had become genuinely punishing. The offer was simple: free accommodation inside the facility, in exchange for thirty hours a month spent as good neighbours to the elderly residents. Not as carers. Not as volunteers in any formal sense. Just as people willing to share the same building, the same meals, the same ordinary days.

It worked. More than that, it changed things.

What Loneliness Actually Does

Before getting to why it worked, it’s worth being clear about what it was working against.

Loneliness in older people is not a soft problem. It is not simply a matter of feeling a bit forgotten. Research has consistently linked social isolation in later life to serious physical and cognitive decline. The evidence is substantial enough that some researchers have compared the health effects of chronic loneliness to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. This is not the kind of statistic that softens with repetition.

Britain has an ageing population and a care system under sustained pressure. The buildings are often there. The staff are often dedicated. What gets harder to provide, as resources tighten and routines solidify, is the texture of ordinary human contact. The kind that is not scheduled, not therapeutic, not purposeful. Just the background hum of people living alongside each other.

That is precisely what Humanitas found a way to supply.

The Smell and the Point

There is something worth naming directly here, because honesty tends to serve an argument better than omitting the difficult parts.

Care homes in Britain often have a particular smell. Cooked vegetables, institutional warmth, the particular quality of air in a building where very old people live and the windows do not open as often as they might. Anyone who has visited a relative in one will know it. It hits you in the entrance hall and stays with you on the drive home. It is nobody’s fault. It is simply what that life smells like from the outside.

The question the Humanitas experiment quietly poses is whether that is a reason to stay away, or a reason to think harder about what we have arranged. Because the smell is not the problem. The problem is the life it often accompanies. Corridors where nothing unexpected happens. Days that follow the same shape regardless of the season. A population of people who have lived entire lives, held opinions, raised families, navigated grief and joy and work and love, now largely invisible to a world that has moved on without them.

Thirty hours a month is less than an hour a day. It is not an enormous ask.

What Actually Changed at Humanitas

The students who moved in were not trained for any of this. They were simply young people who needed somewhere to live and were willing to meet the condition. What followed was not a programme so much as a gradual accumulation of ordinary moments.

They taught residents to send emails, to use smartphones, to navigate the parts of modern life that had drifted out of reach. They watched football together. They were there when someone fell ill, which is often when the sense of disconnection bites hardest. They brought, in the words of one resident, the outside world back inside the building.

One of the students, reflecting on what living there had meant to him, said he had arrived expecting to help a little and found instead that the relationships ran deeper than he had anticipated. Another said the experience had taught him to slow down. Not to become older, but to become more aware of what life actually contains.

That is not a small thing to learn at twenty three.

The Design of Connection

What makes the Humanitas model genuinely interesting, beyond the warmth of the individual stories, is how little it required in structural terms. No new buildings. No government initiative. No significant funding. Just the recognition that two groups of people with complementary needs were being kept unnecessarily apart.

Students needed affordable housing. Elderly residents needed the unpredictable, unscheduled presence of other human beings. The solution was to stop treating those as separate problems.

There is something in this that applies well beyond care homes. We have become, over several decades, very good at sorting people by age. Schools, universities, offices, retirement communities, each stage of life has its allocated space, and the stages rarely overlap. This feels efficient. It’s probably not. The things that pass between generations when they are actually in the same room, patience, perspective, humour, the particular texture of a life fully lived, do not travel well across the distance we have built between them.

The Stoics had something to say about this. Marcus Aurelius returned frequently in his private writing to the question of what we owe each other simply by virtue of being human, of sharing the same brief window of existence. Not in abstract terms, but practically. What do you actually do, today, to contribute to the people around you? Not the people it is easy to be with, or professionally convenient to help, but the people who most need the simple fact of your presence.

Thirty hours a month is a workable answer to that question.

The Wider Implication

The Humanitas model has since inspired similar programmes across Europe and beyond. The underlying logic travels. It does not require the particular geography of Deventer, or the Dutch housing market, or any specific institutional arrangement. It requires only the willingness to recognise that the distance between generations is a choice, not an inevitability, and that the costs of maintaining it fall most heavily on the people least able to bear them.

In Britain, where care homes sit mostly in large converted houses on the edges of market towns and rural villages, where the grounds are often pleasant and the common rooms often quiet, there is space for this kind of thinking. The buildings are already there. The need is not in question. What is sometimes missing is the imagination to see that the solution might already be living a few miles away, looking for somewhere affordable to put their furniture.

A bed and thirty hours. Not much to ask. Possibly more than enough.