‘Funnily Enough, What Matters to People is Other People’

Hardeep Matharu speaks to Maff Potts, founder of Camerados, an organisation working to combat isolation by bringing ‘public living rooms’ to community spaces and getting strangers talking

HM: How did you personally come to be involved in wanting to tackle loneliness, and what led to the creation of Camerados?

MP: I came to this idea, not as someone who had examined the data or done academic research, but purely and completely as a practitioner working in social justice for 20 years. 

I ran projects for people who are homeless, women fleeing domestic violence, those with addictions and mental health problems – including at one of the biggest homeless providers in the country, the Salvation Army – and I just saw what worked and didn’t work.