In these two short Focus pieces, Dr Timothy J. Senior and Dr Karen Gray reflect on what it means to do co-creation with older adults and support wellbeing evaluation activities. With a focus on the Banbury Heritage Project, they outline key challenges, recommendations and how those recommendations might be put into practice.
Co-creation with older adults
Collaborative creation (co-creation) is a powerful way to work with older adults, placing their lived experiences at the heart of meaningful projects. However, it also brings challenges—requiring confidence, commitment, and a safe, inclusive space where people can contribute in ways that feel right for them.
The Banbury Heritage Project explored how different types of co-creation might work with older adults. While many were eager to engage with heritage, co-creation may not always be the place to start, but rather a place to build up to. Our key learning highlights the need to start ‘where people are’, support personal journeys, and embrace different ways of participating.
As part of the Banbury Heritage project’s exploration of co-creation, we piloted a new activity using AI to generate Heritage Postcards, helping participants to tell their own heritage stories through images and audio. This simple, yet creative approach empowered individuals to share, learn, and shape the activity on their own terms.
Our work shows that co-creation should be ambitious but also adaptable—ensuring older adults have agency while recognising their unique needs. By working alongside participants, we can create heritage experiences that are inclusive, personal, and led by those who matter most.
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Evaluating wellbeing impact
Heritage activities can greatly enhance wellbeing, offering social connection, resilience, and self-expression—particularly for older adults. However, conventional evaluation methods often fail to capture these nuanced benefits, limiting the ability of organisations to adapt and grow meaningful wellbeing programmes.
Our work with the Banbury Heritage Project has highlighted some of the challenges in measuring wellbeing outcomes. Heritage engagement may resist a classic ‘wellbeing intervention’ model, driving an expression and time-course of outcomes that may not register in standard evaluation metrics.
By prioritising flexible, reflective evaluation methods, we can better understand the true impact of heritage projects, ensuring that both participants and organisations benefit from deeper insight, meaningful engagement, and a more grounded view of success.
To the ends, the Banbury Heritage Project is contributing to the development of a new evaluation practice, one being designed to help participants narrate their personal wellbeing journeys. This approach values lived experience, supporting people to reflect on where they’ve come from, what they’ve gained from heritage engagement, and how those experiences may shape their future.
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