Eldre innvandrere og organisasjoner

This report is a part of a more comprehensive study about the adaption to care services among elderly ethnic minorities in Norway. This project is financed by the Royal Ministry of Children, Equality and Social Inclusion. The ambition of this part of the study called “The relationship between elderly immigrants and organisations» is to get more and better knowledge about what three different types of voluntary organisations do in relation to elderly immigrants. The organisations under examination are immigrant organisations, traditional humanitarian and interest organisations. They have been presented two questions: 1) Do elderly immigrants participate in your organisation? 2) Does your organisation arrange specific activities towards elderly immigrants? Altogether we obtained contact with twenty (20) organisations, among them four (4) local immigrant organisations, four (4) humanitarian and twelve (12) organisations from the traditional and nationwide Norwegian voluntary sector. Nine (9) representatives from seven (7) of these organisations have been interviewed. Important themes in the interviews were: Building of confidence among the elderly participants in the meeting places, learning through dialogue, separation of the participants by gender, the significance of language and cultural antagonism. Data of our investigation generally show a rather low level of activity towards elderly immigrants in the traditional humanitarian and the interest organisations. We have nevertheless registered that some of the organisations have succeeded in establishing types of meeting places where elderly immigrants can get together in a social setting and use the offered activities, especially those related to preventive health care. Offerings like Norwegian language lessons, health classes, traditional cuisine and social get-togethers have made these meeting places a valuable contribution to social relations and source of information about the society. Especially elderly women seem to benefit from the meeting places of the organisations where they have an opportunity to a social life outside family and home. But the study has shown that also men have a need for meeting places and that they experience them as important for both physical and mental health. In the voluntary immigrant organisations the meeting places show a combination of social get-togethers and activities attached to preventive health care in collaboration with experts from the professional interest organisations. Meetings like this seem to be appreciated by the participants. Work with health care activities for elderly immigrants is most explicitly developed in the interest organisations. The need for such activities seems to be larger than what is at disposal today. Work and activity in voluntary organisations have traditionally played an important role in the Norwegian society. There are reasons to believe that they can contribute to better integration of immigrants. However, in order to obtain such an aim, we need to know more about this area, above all better knowledge about the immigrants’ organisations. We also need to get more knowledge about how and to which extent the immigrants own organisations, humanitarian and interest organisations have an inherent potential to represent a supplement to public health care for elderly immigrants. In this respect our results so far rest on a too limited data collection with emphasis on small and local organisations. More investigations on immigrant nationwide and local organisations are recommended