Building a Warmer Community Across Wales This Winter

There is something about September in Wales that changes the rhythm of life almost overnight. Evenings shorten, doors close a little earlier, gardens empty, and those spontaneous summer opportunities to meet people begin to disappear.

For some, autumn is wonderfully cosy. For others, those darker evenings can quietly make the world feel smaller.

That is why, as we move into the colder months, I want Naturism Wales to concentrate on something much bigger than organising places to go. I want us to keep building community throughout Wales.

A community is not simply a collection of people who occasionally attend the same event. It is friendship, recognition and that reassuring feeling that somewhere out there are people who know your name and would notice if you disappeared for a while.

The figures remind us why that matters. The Welsh Government’s latest Wellbeing of Wales report records that 13% of people in Wales were classified as lonely on its six-measure loneliness scale, while 36% said they missed having people around. More recent ONS research across Great Britain found that 23% of adults felt lonely often, always or some of the time in January 2026.

Those aren’t abstract percentages. They are our neighbours, colleagues, friends and quite possibly people reading this.

It is also why we have been looking at how Naturism Wales can remain a living community when geography, weather, work, family commitments or simply a miserable Wednesday evening make getting together physically difficult.

Introducing the Naturism Wales Community Lounge

Our new Community Lounge gives members another way to stay connected in real time.

Members can message each other, make voice calls and video call from within the online community, allowing conversations started at an event, sauna, camp or social gathering to continue long afterwards.

And importantly, there are no confusing apps to install, no extra downloads and no need to learn another platform. It is all there within the Naturism Wales online community members already use.

And there is more.

The Community Lounge is completely free for all Naturism Wales members.

No additional subscription. No separate membership tier. No charge for simply staying connected with the people who make this community what it is.

Perhaps you met somebody in Cardiff but live in Flintshire. Maybe your closest NiW friend is in Pembrokeshire. Perhaps you’ve been chatting in the community for months but have never quite managed to be in the same place at the same time.

Now distance becomes considerably less important.

There is another reason I wanted this.

Privacy matters.

Building a friendship online should not automatically require handing somebody your personal telephone number or immediately moving conversations onto another social network. The Community Lounge gives members an additional way to get to know one another through the Naturism Wales community before deciding what personal information, if any, they want to share.

That principle matters to me. Good communities create opportunities for connection without demanding unnecessary intimacy before trust has had time to grow.

But technology itself isn’t the achievement here.

A video-call button is just a button.

Its value appears when someone presses it and two people who might otherwise have spent the evening alone end up laughing for an hour.

When somebody new makes their first proper friend within Naturism Wales. When four people scattered across Wales turn a wet winter evening into an impromptu catch-up.

I wrote recently about handwritten letters, random acts of kindness and finding little ways of keeping people connected through autumn and winter. This is another part of the same idea.

Belonging should not be seasonal.

Naturism Wales exists because people matter to one another. Acceptance, Kindness, Respect & Community only mean something when we turn those words into everyday human behaviour.

So this winter, don’t simply join the Community Lounge to see who’s there.

Say hello.

Start a conversation.

Call somebody you’ve met.

Welcome somebody you haven’t.

Because the best thing we can build across Wales isn’t a website, an event programme or even a new piece of technology.

It’s the knowledge that wherever we happen to be, none of us has to feel very far away.

Who will you say hello to first?