As part of our ageing programme, we are hosting a learning seminar at our offices in 50 Hoxton Square today in order to tie together knowledge on an important strand of our work: life transitions.

The seminar, which sees a mixture of ageing and community groups, volunteers, policy makers, funders and academics joining together, will be used as a platform to launch our recently commissioned literature review of transitions in later life.

This scoping research, prepared by Guy Robertson, will help the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation UK Branch gain an insight into conceptualising later life as transitions in order to inform the development of the next phase in our ageing programme. The research seeks to address: how to understand which transitions are more important and what criteria should be used to decide this, what the current responses which help people experiencing transitions are and how effective these responses are and if there is an appropriate balance between what is needed and what is available.

Our learning seminar and the launch of this report mark an important stage in our work on life transitions. We hope that people will share what we already know about life transitions and offer new insights so that we can influence attitudes and the trajectory of future policy and practice in this area. We believe that viewing later life through the prism of transitions rather than focussing on chronological age is a more realistic approach helping people to see events as emotional processes which they can successfully emerge from.

A summary of the report can be read here. The full report can be found here.