Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Nobody's lonely in a crowd like that.
The Beatles knew how to beat loneliness: you do it with other people, as the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover makes abundantly clear.
Mark Pascall would surely know all those songs. He’s a man on a mission and he’s been looking with envy at another English entity: the town of Frome, in Somerset.
Ten years ago, Frome achieved something that no longer happens, almost anywhere in the developed world: its emergency hospital admissions fell. From 2013 to 2017, while emergency admissions across the whole county rose 29%, in Frome they fell 14%.
It wasn’t new technology that caused this. Nor was it new medical procedures or new drugs. It certainly wasn’t more funding. As a study in the peer-reviewed British Journal of General Practice revealed, the difference was something called the Compassionate Frome Project.
Launched in 2013 by a local GP, Helen Kingston, the project addressed the problem of loneliness, especially among older people.
As the Guardian reported, Kingston “kept encountering patients who seemed defeated by the medicalisation of their lives: treated as if they were a cluster of symptoms rather than a human being who happened to have health problems”.
Working with the local council and a National Health Service (NHS) unit, she set up a directory of agencies and community groups. That allowed them to identify gaps in services, which they could fill with new groups.
“Health connectors” were employed, to help patients plan the care they needed. And volunteer “community connectors” were trained, to bring people together.
They don’t give you Prozac, they give you a gardening group.
Or join you up to a choir where, maybe, you get to sing: “It’s wonderful to be here, it’s certainly a thrill ... ”
“The point,” said the Guardian at the time, “was to break a familiar cycle of misery: illness reduces people’s ability to socialise, which leads in turn to isolation and loneliness, which then exacerbates illness.”
Loneliness is a killer. Being part of a community helps you stay well.
Here in New Zealand, Pascall’s envy of Frome is not due only to the remarkable success of the Compassionate Frome Project. What he sees is well-channelled micro-funding making a difference where mainstream funding channels have often failed.
And he’s part of a group called The Wellbeing Protocol which is trying to make that happen here.
Pascall is a tall, rangy man who has developed the art of speaking with patience (there are many more people he still has to talk to) and urgency (there’s a lot of desperation in the world).
In the last month, he’s been the keynote speaker at events in Auckland and Wellington, talking about the lessons from Frome and presenting his group’s credentials to philanthropists, funding agencies and community groups.
They call themselves a “social innovation platform” and, with the backing of Xero founder and philanthropist Rod Drury, the Menzies Foundation in Australia and the Ethereum Foundation in Switzerland, their aim is to “radically transform how capital flows”.
“We’re challenging the power structures within the current philanthropic/social welfare systems,” Pascall says.
To do this, they’ve created what they call a “groundbreaking tool to transform community-led funding”. That’s another way of saying they’ve built a clever app.
Philanthropists and public funders alike can register, as can hopeful recipients of funding: charities, social enterprises, NGOs and others. The system is transparent, so participants on both sides can see each other’s credentials, choose the partners they want, set their criteria for working together and track how the money is spent.
It’s also flexible, so the funding support and the need for it can be kept under review.
And perhaps most critically, recipients get a real say in how money is spent.
At the Auckland launch, Forsyth Barr’s head of philanthropy Simon Bowden introduced Pascall and called The Wellbeing Protocol “the opposite of the ImpactLab approach”. ImpactLab is the data-analysis agency established by Sir Bill English that tracks welfare spending.
The Wellbeing Protocol platform has been trialled overseas, including in Australia by Regen Melbourne. In this trial, residents in the suburb of Sandringham were invited to co-design and allocate funding for sustainability and wellbeing initiatives.
The result, according to Josh Devine from the Regen Melbourne project team, was “a more connected, empowered, and responsive community. Residents weren’t just recipients – they were decision-makers. The funding process became a source of trust and momentum, not friction”.
Ecostore co-founder Malcolm Rands, now a social entrepreneur and philanthropist, was at the Auckland launch.
“It’s rare to see a project with the potential to make giving more transparent, more human, and more effective,” Rands said. “The Wellbeing Protocol is one of them.”
Oliver Bruce, an angel investor and “community builder”, was at the Wellington event.
“We’ve got the technology in our pockets, our smartphones,” he said. “We can co-ordinate ourselves in a far more efficient and transparent way. I’m very excited about what the next steps might start to look like.”
Hannah Knight is Drury’s director of philanthropy.
“I’ve watched The Wellbeing Protocol evolve into something powerful,” she says. “It’s a new model for funding that restores agency to communities and redefines what meaningful giving looks like.”
“We’re not just fixing a broken system,” Pascall says, “we’re replacing it. This is infrastructure for a new economy, where funding is local, efficient, and led by the people who live the challenges every day.”
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.