Livre d'Or

I think that's a really good way to approach it. It's a big issue, even a seasoned, engaged activist like you isn't going to Fix All The Things here. But yes, just spending some social time with someone and not having to play the pronoun game, that sounds like it could well be worthwhile. Or sometimes even having someone to visit at all, if you're an older gay man or lesbian there's a good probability you have no children to visit you and no religious community supporting you.

From a community-building perspective, I really strongly believe that having a shared project with the aim of helping others is much better for building community than just trying to get together for the sake of being a community or mutually supportive group. If you can get a scheme up and running I imagine it could go quite a way to helping the volunteers feel like a cohesive community too. There's also the eldering thing, the lack of cross-generational continuity and access to history that people always talk about in GSM contexts, I only have vague fuzzy concepts in this direction but something like that.