Emerging from lockdown with a new look – and a new emphasis in our name.
We’re nearly there for welcoming more members back to SoLO – our planning continues to ensure everything is as safe as we can make it and like everyone in this strange world we’re all in at the moment, we’re cleaning and spacing for appropriate social distancing. Like many organisations, we’re facing the challenge of changing the way things can be done. We successfully enabled our children’s services to continue over the Easter holidays and now we’re re-introducing our adults’ opportunities in our new Pods. We’ve been contacting our members and further details will be sent out over the next couple of weeks. Our PA service has continued to run to support members in their homes and we have Personal Assistants ready and waiting for those who would benefit from additional support.
As you may know, before the lockdown we were most of the way through a review both of our website, and of how we present ourselves more generally. The review included asking members, their families and SoLO staff for their views. Lots of the replies suggested that our website should be as user-friendly, helpful and professional, as SoLO itself.
Since then, the lockdown period has brought home, quite distressingly in many cases, how hard it can be to go without meeting friends to work and have fun together. The need for a varied, interesting social life has been demonstrated, by its removal. This convinced the trustees that the time is right for a new emphasis in our name. We are still SoLO but, whereas SoLO has, for years, been short for SoLO Life Opportunities, we are changing that to Social Life Opportunities. As we offer services beyond Solihull we removed Solihull from our name a few years ago but it remained as part of our website address. We’re also now picking up on another point which featured strongly in feedback – an association that new people potentially think we’re an agency for single people.
Our new look is “live” now, though, because of lockdown, we are still not permitted to offer the full range of features on the website. One of the practical highlights – being able to book and pay for activities online – will be available as soon as we’re able to add it. Feel free to browse and to let us know what you do and don’t like about it (we’re bound to have got some things that need tweaking!).
We’ll continue to be in touch with you and we look forward to seeing you, as well as hearing from you, as soon as circumstances allow.
