HOW WE MAKE A CHANGE
THE BASE APPROACH
FROM PEER-TO-PEER ACTIVATION TO ACTIVE NEIGHBOURHOOD ECOSYSTEMS
The BASE approach is built on the understanding that healthy ageing is not limited to physical fitness or the absence of illness, but is closely linked to how people think, feel, interact, and participate in their social environment. In this sense, BASE promotes a holistic concept of healthy lifestyle that brings together four interrelated dimensions: the body, the mind, cognition, and social relations. With it, we recognise that Physical activity, nutrition, and mobility are understood as essential foundations, but they are inseparable from emotional wellbeing, cognitive engagement, and meaningful social connections.
From a BASE perspective, improvements in one dimension often reinforce the others. For example, becoming more physically active can enhance confidence and mood, stimulate cognitive functioning, and create opportunities for social interaction. Likewise, social participation and a sense of belonging can motivate people to adopt healthier behaviours and to remain engaged over time. This interdependence is particularly relevant for older people, for whom health, autonomy, and social connectedness are strongly intertwined. At the same time, our approach acknowledges and considers that older people should be developing healthy lifestyles that are balanced so that it represents what they personally need at a given time.
BASE therefore moves beyond individual behaviour change and focuses on the social environments in which lifestyles are shaped. With it, the BASE Active Neighbourhood Ecosystems are introduced as local learning, co-creation and collaboration environments that enable and sustain healthy lifestyles through everyday community life. Rather than being a single programme or facility, an Active Neighbourhood is a dynamic network of actors and opportunities within a defined local area. It brings together diverse stakeholders from sport, health, social work, culture, volunteering, and related fields, alongside municipalities, community organisations, and citizens themselves.
Within an Active Neighbourhood, existing initiatives and services are made more visible, accessible, and interconnected. In addition, they allow for sharing resources, aligning individual agendas towards a more collective one, and for ideation and co-creation process across sectors and disciplines.
Activities for the still non- or less-active older people offered by or supported by the ecosystem stakeholders may range from physical activity and movement-based initiatives to cultural participation, volunteering, social gatherings, or practical health-related actions such as cooking or walking groups. What unites them is not their format, but their contribution to supporting older people in staying active, connected, and engaged in ways that are meaningful to them.
In this context, BASE positions itself as an enabler and connector, not as a provider of new standalone services. The project does not seek to replace existing local offers or professional roles. Instead, it strengthens and enriches what is already there by building capacities, fostering cooperation, and supporting alignment across sectors. Through the training of Active Neighbourhood Buddies and Mentors, BASE helps local actors to better use existing resources, identify gaps, and co-create inclusive pathways into community life.
OUR TWO-TIER CAPACITY BUILDING MODEL
COMBINING PEER-TO-PEER ACTIVATION WITH PROFESSIONAL MENTORING
At the core of our BASE approach lies a two-tier capacity-building model that combines peer-to-peer activation with professional mentoring. This model is designed to address both the human dimension of behavioural change and the systemic conditions required to sustain healthy lifestyles and active social participation at community level. Rather than relying on a single type of actor, BASE therefore distributes roles and responsibilities across two complementary learning pathways: Active Neighbourhood Buddies and Active Neighbourhood Mentors.
The first tier focuses on peer-based activation through Active Neighbourhood Buddies.
Buddies are active older people who are well embedded in their local communities and who share similar life experiences with the peers they support. Their proximity in age, context, and everyday realities allows them to better approach, build trust, lower thresholds for participation, and engage older people who may be hesitant to join especially formal, but also existing informal local community programmes or services. Through their training, Buddies develop a holistic understanding of healthy lifestyle, learn simple and applicable methods to encourage behavioural change, and gain confidence in supporting social reconnection.
Their role is voluntary and operational: Buddies do not design the Active Neighbourhood Ecosystems, but they help peers to navigate existing opportunities, accompany them into activities, and provide encouragement and continuity within the Active Neighbourhood Ecosystem. In addition, they support the local community service providers to re-design existing activities so that they are more applicable for the older people, or they come up with their own ideas of new activities that are empowering older people to be active and to engage.
The second tier provides professional guidance and sustainability through Active Neighbourhood Mentors.
Mentors are paid sport, health, and social work professionals who already possess relevant pedagogical or facilitation experience. Their role is to train, support, guide, and empower the Buddies while nurturing the broader Active Neighbourhood Ecosystem. Mentor training deepens competences in designing and facilitating local collaboration and learning environments, applying mentoring and capacity-building methods, and ensuring safeguarding and ethical standards in community-based work with older people. By working across organisational and sectoral boundaries, Mentors help align stakeholders, open access to resources, and translate local needs into coordinated action.
The interaction between Buddies and Mentors is central to the effectiveness of the model. Buddies contribute lived experience, local knowledge, and peer credibility, while Mentors contribute professional oversight, methodological support, resources and strategic perspective. This reciprocal relationship allows learning and action to evolve iteratively: feedback from Buddies and older participants informs adjustments to local activities or to develop new active and healthy lifestyle offers, while Mentors help reflect on experiences and translate them into improved practice and ecosystem development.
OUR ECOSYSTEM APPROACH
A central challenge at local community level for the older people to become more active and to engage in healthy lifestyles is often not a lack of activities, but a lack of connection, trust, and navigability, or a lack of adequate engagement pathways and activation approaches.
Yet, traditional responses to inactivity and social isolation of older people often focus on creating a great variety of ingenious projects, courses, or services. While such programmes are valuable, they are, however, frequently designed and delivered in isolation, limited in duration, and dependent on professional support and fixed structures.
Instead of treating activities as stand-alone interventions, BASE focuses on strengthening connections between existing local actors, places, and initiatives. The BASE ecosystem approach makes the different elements visible, linked, and mutually reinforcing. The goal is not coordination for its own sake, but creating clearer, safer, and more navigable pathways for older people to engage.
From creating only new services to activating and adapting to what already exists
BASE does not start from the general assumption that something is “missing” locally. In most piloting communities, we learnt that a variety of healthy lifestyle and social activities already existed. What was often missing was proper activation: someone who notices opportunities, lowers thresholds, accompanies first steps, and adapts offers to real needs.
Our Active Neighbourhood Buddies, supported by the Mentors, play exactly this role. They help translate existing offers into something approachable, meaningful, and realistic for inactive or less active peers. Ans in some cases, they helped to adapt the existing initiatives or designed new activities to better match realities.
From professional-led delivery to peer-enabled community action
Another key shift of the BASE community activities lies in who activates whom. Rather than relying solely on professionals to recruit and motivate participants, BASE places older people themselves at the centre of activation. With it, our Active Neighbourhood Buddies act as trusted peers who share lived experience, local knowledge, and social proximity.
This peer-enabled approach reduces power distance, builds trust more quickly, and addresses fears of “not belonging.” Professionals remain essential, but their role shifts towards enabling, mentoring, and connecting rather than directly delivering all activities.
Aligning Individual Agendas into a Shared Local Purpose
A central intention of our BASE Active Neighbourhood Ecosystem approach is to bring together different individual agendas and align them towards a shared, collective purpose that benefits older people and the wider community. The reason is that the diverse local stakeholders naturally come with their own mandates, priorities, constraints, and success indicators.
With our BASE approach, we do acknowledge this fact, and we do not seek to replace or override these individual agendas. Instead, our ecosystem approach creates a space where these agendas can be made visible, understood, and connected so that a collective agenda setting becomes visible.
By working towards such a collective agenda for active and healthy ageing, the ecosystem stakeholders can identify win–win situations: for example, sport clubs reach new participant groups, health actors strengthen prevention, municipalities improve social inclusion, community organisations increase engagement, and older people gain accessible and meaningful opportunities to participate. This alignment increases impact not by adding more activities, but by using existing resources more coherently and effectively.
Working at Eye Level: Valuing Diverse Knowledge
Another defining characteristic of our BASE Active Neighbourhood Ecosystem is that stakeholders collaborate at eye level. This means that different forms of knowledge are equally valued, whether it is professional expertise (e.g. health, sport, social work), lived experience of older people, local place-based knowledge, or practical know-how from volunteers and community actors.
This means that in BASE, older people - especially and specifically our Active Neighbourhood Buddies - are not treated as passive beneficiaries or consultation objects, but as knowledge holders and co-creators. Their insights into daily routines, barriers, motivations, and social dynamics are essential for designing activities that truly work in practice.
This equal acknowledgement of knowledge creates a learning-oriented environment in which new, shared understanding emerges. Rather than transferring predefined solutions, stakeholders jointly develop improved ways of supporting active and healthy lifestyles that are deeply rooted in the local context.
Creating Space for Out-of-the-Box and Contextualised Solutions
Practice shows that, when individual agendas are aligned and knowledge is shared at eye level, the ecosystem becomes a space for creative and out-of-the-box thinking. Stakeholders are encouraged to move beyond standard programme formats and to explore unconventional entry points, small adaptations, or hybrid solutions that better fit local realities.
In practice this may include adapting existing activities to lower thresholds rather than creating new ones, combining social and physical elements in unexpected ways, using informal neighbourhood spaces instead of formal venues, or designing activities that grow organically from relationships rather than fixed schedules.
Because solutions are co-created with those who will use them, they are fully contextualised, more accessible, and more likely to be sustained over time. In this way, the BASE Active Neighbourhood Ecosystem supports not only innovation, but also ownership, relevance, and long-term impact for active and healthy ageing in the community.
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If you’re looking to make a change in your life to become more active and healthy. Or you like to support others by becoming a change agent or change mentor? Look no further! Join us by filling our form or email us.
