small voice of the month – Lingo Flamingo

Every month we celebrate a person or organisation that’s making a big difference in the world but without necessarily making a big noise about it. The wonderfully-named Lingo Flamingo is the world’s first non-for-profit organisation who provide outreach tailored foreign language classes to older adults. They go into local communities and train tutors, providing them with specialised training about making language learning as accessible as possible. This whole enterprise is based on the evidence that learning a foreign language can help to ward off dementia and strokes, evidence collected at Edinburgh University and used by Robbie Norval to create this programme of language learning for older people which includes games, music and even flamenco dancing.

Find out more in our March podcast from around 31’40 minutes in.

Margaret met up with Robbie Norval (right) in a Glasgow cafe and spoke to him about what inspired Lingo Flamingo. You can hear a clip in the podcast and watch out for the full interview coming soon as a podcast extra.

Visit Lingo Flamingo’s website

High praise from high places! “Lingo Flamingo is a wonderful initiative, making education more accessible to vunerable members in our society. It is another illustration of the great talent that we possess here in Scotland to address social challenges in innovative ways.” Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister Scotland