Built by Showing Up

Participation is not a completed survey... it's showing up and taking part.

Photo by sk on Unsplash

In 2017, a group of women in a small Victorian town started a weekly walking group. It wasn’t formal. No grant. No constitution. Just a few neighbours, some curiosity, and a couple of creaky knees. What began as a light-hearted attempt to stay fit quickly turned into something else. The walks were followed by tea. Then came monthly dinners. Then a small repair café. Over time, it evolved into an informal ageing collective—offering shared meals, transport rosters, and care for members whose partners were sick or who’d recently lost someone.

No one asked them to. No official endorsed it. They didn’t wait to be consulted. They just started.

And what they built wasn’t a program. It was a practice.

What’s striking isn’t how extraordinary that story is—but how ordinary it should be. Because the problem with aged care as we’ve built it isn’t just that it offers too little. It’s that it expects even less. We’ve normalised systems that quietly sideline people under the guise of protecting them. The more frail you appear, the less agency you’re given. And in place of participation, we offer entertainment.

We talk about empowerment, but often we mean managed engagement—forums, tick-box surveys, a designated “consumer voice” role at the table. It’s structured. It’s sanitised. And it’s safe. But thriving communities don’t emerge from polite consultation. They grow from the daily, messy, collective work of people showing up.

In fact, when older people are given real opportunities to contribute, the effects are staggering. A 2023 study in The Lancet Healthy Longevity found that older adults who regularly participate in local community life—through volunteering, clubs, or shared initiatives—are a third less likely to experience cognitive decline. Meanwhile, the ABS reports that people aged 65+ who engage in regular community activity are far more likely to report high life satisfaction than those who don’t. The difference isn’t marginal. It’s defining.

But we’ve designed a system that actively gets in the way. Risk frameworks dominate. Compliance trumps creativity. Participation becomes a paper trail. And the people closest to the problems—the ones with the most insight and the most to gain—are often the ones least likely to be included in shaping the answers.

We treat involvement as exceptional when it should be expected.

Because real participation is never an add-on. It’s not the workshop you run before launching a program. It is the program. It’s the Wednesday morning tea roster. The shared garden. The former tradesman running a weekly mending circle. It’s a culture of contribution that says: your value doesn’t retire when you do.

And here’s what I’ve come to believe: we need to stop inviting older people into pre-structured systems and start supporting them to shape the structures themselves. Not because we’re trying to keep people “engaged,” but because people of all ages deserve to be agents of their own lives.

Let them lead with their passions. Let them choose how they participate. Don’t ask them to fill out another survey—ask them what they care about, and build from there. You’ll find that people often want to be involved. They just need a platform, not a program.

One of the most powerful ways to begin this shift is also one of the simplest. Don’t ask your parents or loved ones “what support might you need as you get older?” Ask instead, “what’s something you love doing that you never want to give up?” And then: “what would it take to keep doing that into your eighties?”

From there, plans start to emerge. Not care plans. Life plans. The kind that help people remain not just safe, but present.

“We don’t need care plans. We need life plans.”

We don’t need new services nearly as much as we need new habits. Habits of asking better questions. Of expecting more from ourselves and each other. Of treating participation not as a kindness, but as a cornerstone of dignity.

That walking group in Victoria didn’t solve the aged care crisis. But they did something more powerful: they refused to wait. They created rhythms of showing up, supporting each other, and taking small, collective responsibility for the shape of their lives. And in doing so, they modelled the future we talk about but rarely make real.

So perhaps the answer isn’t to invent the next innovation. Perhaps it’s to notice what’s already working in the quiet corners and decide that it counts. To pay attention to the energy that’s already there and build platforms that help it grow.

Because participation isn’t policy setting. It’s practice. And it’s one we can all begin now—by showing up, paying attention, and remembering that care isn’t something delivered. It’s something we do, together.