SIGNAL Lifemaps

SIGNAL Lifemaps are a way of understanding people’s lives in the round, not just the moment they come into contact with a service. They help us see the patterns, turning points and pressures that shape someone’s experience of connection, isolation and support over time.

Built alongside residents, Lifemaps capture what has mattered in people’s lives, relationships, health, work, neighbourhoods and sense of purpose. They make visible the moments that strengthened connection, as well as the points where support fell away or life became harder to navigate.

For Connect, SIGNAL Lifemaps are both a listening tool and a learning tool. They help practitioners work in a more person-centred way, grounding conversations in what people care about rather than what services offer. At a system level, they allow us to step back and notice shared patterns across many lives, highlighting where preventative, relational support can make the greatest difference.

By holding individual stories alongside wider learning, Lifemaps help bridge the gap between lived experience and system design, keeping people’s real lives at the centre of how we think, learn and act.

How SIGNAL Lifemaps helped Delfa

When Abby, a Connection Catalyst worked with Delfa, the Lifemap helped slow the conversation down and look beyond the immediate reason she’d been referred to Connect. By mapping key moments in her life, it became clear that her isolation wasn’t new. It had built up gradually after a series of losses, changes in health and a shrinking social circle.

Seeing these moments laid out together helped Delfa make sense of her own journey, not as something “going wrong”, but as a series of understandable responses to difficult transitions. For practitioners, it shifted the focus from fixing a single problem to supporting reconnection at the right pace, starting with small, meaningful steps that reflected what had mattered to her before.

The Lifemap gave both Delfa and the Connect team a shared picture of her story. That shared understanding shaped the support that followed and helped ensure it was rooted in her life, not just the service offer.