Age Friendly Ireland, the Creative Ireland Programme and the Department of Rural and Community Development have launched a new initiative to combat isolation and preserve the social history of small communities throughout Ireland.

The Community Time Machine is an age-friendly, cross-generational community building project is designed to connect young people with their older neighbours through a series of facilitated interviews, art projects and photography. The delivery partner is Street Feast CLG (trading as Neighbourhood Network). Working together, the two generations will create a picture of what their communities looked like in the past and how they have changed. From these engagements an exhibition website will be created to house the conversations had, the pictures from each project and of their participants. The interviews and pictures will also be added to a community time capsule and sealed for 10 years so that an important archive of social change will be preserved for generations to come.

The project will run in six counties, Kilkenny, Dun Laoghaire Rathdown, Cavan, Longford, Donegal and Kildare, commencing in October 2021. The project was successfully piloted last year in Wicklow during the height of the pandemic, and is also currently being delivered in Meath, Monaghan and Westmeath.

Please note that the details of events listed above are provided by the relevant Local Authorities.