Almost two million people in the UK live with sight loss that significant impacts on their daily lives. This number will increase dramatically in the coming decades, driven by our aging population. People with sight loss experience lower levels of participation and increased restrictions across many aspects of their lives, both compared with other disabled people and compared with the general population (McManus and Lord, 2012). Analysis conducted by RNIB (with NatCen Social Research) found that people with sight loss: - Had lower levels of wellbeing and self-confidence, and lower satisfaction with health - Experienced more difficulties accessing health services - Were more likely to experience financial hardship - Faced more restrictions to participation in education and employment - Reported less choice about how they spend their free time - Faced major barriers to travel and shopping. A wide range of organisations, from large national charities to small local voluntary groups, work to improve circumstances for people with sight loss. 97 local sight loss charities are members of Visionary, the umbrella organisation for local sight loss organisations. VISION 2020 UK, an organisation bringing together national sight loss organisations, has a further 52 members. Both actively endorse this bid. Organisations need evidence to develop services and secure funds to deliver those services, but many within the sector highlight lack of research awareness, skills and resources as a critical issue. We believe that it is vital that good quality survey data, and social research in general, be communicated to and understood by a wide range of people across the sight loss sector, to enable the sector to: - Develop services on the basis of evidence of need. - Make an evidence-based case in funding applications and fundraising activity. - Inform their internal organisational strategies and priorities. - Generate authoritative statistics for campaign work. - Avoid unnecessary external research commissioning. - Identify gaps in their evidence base. - Lobby or influence the policy and practice of public and private organisations from a position of informed authority. Our programme of work involves five Work Strands: Work Strand 1 - Knowledge exchange across the sector. Eight regional workshops and networking events to examine local sight loss organisations' evidence needs and to provide training in how existing datasets and research could meet those needs. Work Strand 2 - Professional and workforce development. A bespoke social research training programme for researchers, policy officers and service managers in the national sight loss sector. Skills developed would include: conducting rapid evidence reviews, principles of research design and specification, processes for data acquisition, data management and basic analysis skills, and techniques and tools for data visualisation. A new post for a formerly unemployed blind or partially sighted trainee will be created, to join the project team to help deliver these work strands. Work Strand 3 - Knowledge Hub. A centre of knowledge and expertise, embedded at RNIB, offering sight loss organisations a point of contact for: data requests, advice on datasets or social science research studies to use, whether research already exists that meets their needs, supporting people to do further analysis themselves and, where necessary and possible, conducting or arranging further analysis. Work Strand 4 - Collaboration and networking. A research network focused on sustainability for the project by developing collaboration and cooperation to help inform or scope new research priorities. Work Strand 5 - Project management and governance. We are organisations with a strong track record of collaborating on projects and networking together. We will build on this, maintain tight project management, and evaluate the programme with clear measures of success.

Mobility, wellbeing and the built environment: Wellbeing in later life is linked to the maintenance of independence, physical mobility itself and the sense of being able to get about. Mobility is vital for accessing services, resources and facilities, for social participation, and for avoiding loneliness. Thus mobility has been described more broadly as 'engagement with the world'. The design of the built environment has a key role to play in enabling - or frustrating - mobility. Thus appropriate design or redesign of the built environment can expand horizons and support wellbeing. However, this project focuses on complements or alternatives to physical design or redesign of the built environment. Design and adaptation are time and resource intensive. Many well-understood mobility barriers remain in place because of budget constraints. Design of the built environment is just one the determinants of mobility and wellbeing. Any one environment cannot meet all needs at once, and needs can vary even for an individual, as people pass through key physical and social transitions which may alter mobility and wellbeing. Based on participatory research, this project aims to create a suite of options and tools which may be able to meet contrasting needs, support mobility and wellbeing, and do so more quickly and affordably than adapting the built environment. The research aims to: 1) Explore mobility and wellbeing for older people going through critical but common life transitions; 2) Investigate and address variation and contradictions in needs of different groups of older people (and even for single individuals over time), and between different built environment agendas; and 3) To co-create practical tools which can act as complements or alternatives to redesign of the built environment. After a foundation stage the work will commence with interviews with national experts and stakeholders. We will select three contrasting local areas in which to base the rest of the research, and interview c15 local stakeholders in each area. We will then start a pioneering quarterly tracking study of mobility and wellbeing, working with c120 older people in the three sites who are experiencing critical but common life transitions such as losing a driving license, losing a partner, or becoming a carer. These transitions are often seen as key points for deterioration in mobility and wellbeing, and as key points for support and intervention. We will then work with a series of small groups of older people in workshops and co-design sessions, to explore the potential for interventions as alternatives and complements to promoting mobility and wellbeing via redesign. Each will involve a series of day-long meetings between researchers and older people, over about a year. One set of workshops will explore how well 'crowdsourcing' and Participatory Geographical Information Systems can add to and collate information about mobility wants and needs and barriers. Another will involve older people with varying interests in relation to the built environment, to explore conflicts and the potential for consensus on some issues. There will be co-design workshops with older people to explore mobile technologies based on SmartPhones, to help people avoid key blockages to mobility in particular areas. Other workshops will work with mobility scooter users, and manufacturers and those whose mobility may be threatened by scooters, to explore the feasibility of adapting scooters to reduce problems. The impact of participation itself will be tracked. Project outputs will include: a project website, accessible annual interim and summative reports to project stakeholders and others, a summative report, articles for academic journals across team member disciplines, trade press articles for relevant professionals, potentially video or new media, a local stakeholder and older person conference and national 'Roadshow', as well as other dissemination events.