At the Blether Tea on Wednesday morning, a group of older people in the East Ayrshire village of Auchinleck sit around a table crammed with mugs and plates of cake in the community centre library.

“It’s not hard to get a conversation going,” says 79-year-old Catherine Burley, with some understatement. “The time flies in.”

Surrounded by piles of selection boxes being parcelled up for local children’s Christmas stockings, the ladies reminisce over practising the Charleston for the weekly village dance “til there was no pattern left on the carpet”, watching the clockwork buses ferrying mine workers for their shift, in the days when “most of us had someone working in the pit”, and the minister who played the accordion every Sunday.

Since Covid, many of their contemporaries have got “a bit thingmy” [anxious] about going out, explains Jean Gibson, 81. “It feels like some folk disappeared.”

The Blether Tea sessions are a reason to reconnect, share memories and make new ones – there was the recent pantomime trip and plans for a new year outing to the local museum: “They’ll maybe keep us there,” deadpans Gibson.

Connection is at the heart of everything that Auchinleck Community Development Initiative (ACDI) does here. Based at this spruce community centre for a decade, run by paid staff and dedicated volunteers, it is “not just a 9-5 service” says its energetic development manager, Stephen McCarron.

As well as support groups for older people, parents and children, it offers help with training, housing, finances and addiction, and a social enterprise garden centre at the back of the building, which has provided jobs for more than 300 previously unemployed locals over the past 10 year.

Donations to this year’s Guardian and Observer charity appeal will go – via our two partners, Locality and Citizens Advice – to scores of local charities and community projects such as ACDI, which are working at the frontline of the cost of living crisis in some of the UK’s most deprived neighbourhoods.

Across the hallway, the weekly Tiny Tots session is finishing up, launched last autumn to encourage parents with young children back out into the community after Covid’s lengthy restrictions.

Susan Kennedy was new to the area: this was the first group she came to with 15-month-old Ty and five-month-old Daisy, and now she has met other mums who live on her estate. “He used to be quite strange [shy] with people but since we’ve come here he’s got to socialise more.”

Youth worker Rachel Alexander says: “The children who come to the centre are very aware of the cost of living, even the younger ones, worrying if mum and dad can buy them Christmas presents.” They use a “worry box” with the youngsters and offer support to their parents discreetly. “It’s more visible in a small village like this one but it’s happening everywhere.”

The capacity to connect comes with proximity, says Stewart. “It’s not someone sitting in Edinburgh with their nose in a spreadsheet. We’re led by people who suffer similar issues to those we help and the lines of communication are always open.”

But if those shoots of community connection were starved during lockdown, their roots were trampled long before that. Aggressive de-industrialisation affected coalmining and textiles, the main employers of men and women of the area, creating structural unemployment and hereditary problems of antisocial behaviour and alcohol misuse, McCarron explains. Social connections such as the miners’ welfare clubs disintegrated and were replaced with apathy, amplified by rural isolation. “These are the forgotten communities.”

The distillation of ACDI’s ethos is its community welfare champion, a post first developed in 2019 in response to rural bank closures (the nearest is Bank of Scotland, a bus ride away in the town of Cumnock) but now expanding its remit to buffer locals through the winter squeeze on cost of living.

In the past year alone, the champion has helped about 125 people raise £165,000 by accessing or streamlining benefits.

The need was already there, says Stewart, with high digital exclusion among older people and low-income families who could not afford hardware, then came the piloting of universal credit in the council area. By the time the pandemic hit “there were queues at the door” to see the champion.

Again, communication is the key, explains the current champion, Paul McKenzie. “Once we’ve demonstrated our commitment and ability to help with a particular issue they come with, then we’re able to have wider, honest conversations.” A good example is alcohol misuse: McKenzie might offer an income assessment, to check an individual is accessing all available benefits support. Then he will try a budgeting exercise: do you need to spend all that on alcohol? Have you thought about some help to reduce your intake?

As for the current crisis facing so many Auchinleck people, “the bang won’t be felt till February when the credit card and fuel bills come in”, says McCarron. It is a looming challenge for the ACDI.

There are plans to extend the champion service to include nearby villages, hold satellite surgeries and train up volunteers to run local money advice campaigns.

“With these small pockets of cash we can make a difference,” he says.