With a three-generation household including her 88-year-old mother and a husband living with leukemia, Deborah Alsina, 51, is only too aware of the challenges and risks of coronavirus.
“I think her view is that you have to keep living,” Alsina says of her mum. “It’s just not possible to mitigate all the risk. We will try to keep her as safe as we possibly can.”
Alsina is the chief executive of Independent Age (IA), a long-established advice and support charity for older people. She took up the post last October, but stayed deliberately low-profile until last week when, in a flurry of media appearances prompted by the virus crisis, she presented as a forceful fresh voice for her sector.
“I’m not someone who will go around shouting about something until I know a bit about it,” she explains.
For the foreseeable future her focus is on the impact of coronavirus on older people. And three things are uppermost in her mind.
“The thing that’s worrying me most is how do we support people if they are not online,” she says. “How do we enable people to easily find help?” Of 1.2 million UK older people thought to be chronically lonely, around 500,000 see no one for five or six days each week. Almost 30% of those aged 65 or over either do not use the internet at all or do not use it weekly.
Although community groups are springing up to respond to the needs of people who are self-isolating, Alsina’s second concern is that the support will be far from comprehensive. “It has to be safe and it has to be coordinated,” she says. “It’s good for the soul to see people helping other people, but it can’t be just your street. What about the street next door?”
Safety is her third worry. Already there are reports of scammers taking advantage of vulnerable people, including by offering to do their shopping. “If it’s your neighbour, and you know them and like them, you’re going to be fine,” she says. “But it’s what happens if it’s someone you’ve never met before.”
With self-isolaters unable to get out to cashpoints, she worries that people will be tempted to hand over bank cards and pin numbers. “Although there are gorgeous people doing wonderful things, there are some real scumbags out there,” she says.
Alsina is talking to other charities and to the government about ensuring that any help for older and younger disabled people is comprehensive, and that a balance is struck between fostering neighbourhood volunteering and protecting vulnerable householders. The potential silver lining of the crisis, she thinks, is that we will emerge a stronger and more cohesive society in which many more of us will know our neighbours and not have to resort to saying, when asked, that they kept themselves to themselves.
“It’s a really interesting positive that could come out of this,” she says. “Let’s turn this tricky, negative situation into something terribly positive where we reconnect with family, friends and neighbours or connect with neighbours for the first time. It’s a brilliant opportunity to go back to those basic principles rather than ‘it’s all about me’.”
Founded in 1863 as the United Kingdom Beneficent Association, IA was later granted a royal charter and for many years was known by the acronym Rukba. It changed its working name in 2005 and merged with two other charities in 2011 to become the current organisation, which employs 170 staff, and benefits from a significant endowment with, says Alsina, “around £170m in the bank”. However, it has also been losing money on its day-to-day activities, which include providing a friendship service for around 2,5000 people identified as chronically lonely and running advice helplines. Its latest published accounts from 2018, show that the charity had to draw on £14.5m from its reserves.
Alsina joined IA from Bowel Cancer UK where she was chief executive for a decade and led its strong growth from a starting point of, in her words, “near-collapse”. She applied for the job because she sees ageing as a cause still not fully recognised by society, and Alsina says she is is drawn to underdogs.
At AI she faces paradoxical tasks of putting the charity in good financial order while at the same time planning to spend more of its resources to increase its impact. Alsina has already replaced the entire senior management team and “de-layered” the organisation and – once the virus crisis is over – will be working with the IA’s governing board, now chaired by crossbench peer Julia Neuberger, on a fresh long-term strategy based on priority areas of older people’s financial security, loneliness and ageism.
The charity will maintain its friendship services, helplines and will continue to host the Campaign to End Loneliness, which Alsina chairs. But she wants IA to work more closely with other charities and is particularly keen to develop partnerships with smaller, local groups.
“There’s a real need for an ecosystem of national and very local organisations to provide the support that older people want, rather than what we think they want,” she says. “We are better able to cope with the terrible fundraising environment that so many charities are experiencing at the moment, so how do we use that stability to help them?”
This week, IA is completing full welfare checks on all the people it supports directly. Its friendship services, operated throughout England, Wales and Scotland by volunteers and staff, are usually a mix of regular telephone calls and visits, but are shifting primarily to the former to help protect both the householder and the volunteer who is often an older person themselves. Alsina is conscious, however, that in some cases it will be necessary for there to be a physical presence.
The strain that the virus crisis is putting on health and care services makes it even more imperative that local groups stay afloat, she adds. “You can’t shove an 80-year-old who has just had Covid-19 straight off a ventilator back home with nobody to help them. Who is going to be there?”
Curriculum vitae
Age: 51.
Lives: Farnham, Surrey.
Family: Married with two sons, one daughter.
Education: The Queen’s school, Chester, and Chester College of Further Education; University of East Anglia (BA, music).
Career: 2019-present: chief executive, Independent Age; 2009-19: chief executive, Bowel Cancer UK; 2008-09: director of services and strategy, Bowel Cancer UK; 2003-08: self-employed consultant; 2002-03: deputy director, Panos Institute; 2000-02: international protection project manager, Refugee Council; 1996-2000: fundraising manager, Refugee Council; 1994-95: fundraising development manager, Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA); 1992-94: fundraising officer, Sense; 1991: fundraising development officer, RIIA; 1989-91: editorial assistant, Nature magazine.
Interests: Walking, travel – and combining both on fundraising treks.
