For some seniors — especially those who’ve engaged in the arts all their lives — watching TV or playing shuffleboard or bingo simply doesn’t qualify as stimulating entertainment.
That’s why the nonprofit EngAGE is bringing all kinds of high-quality arts activities, from painting to theater, to affordable senior housing complexes in southern California. The group even spurred the creation of several unique arts colonies just for seniors: the Burbank Senior Artists Colony, the NoHo Senior Arts Colony and the Long Beach Senior Arts Colony. These housing complexes ensure that residents’ lives are enriched with arts through such activities as theater groups, a fine arts collective, music programming, an indie film company and an intergenerational arts program that brings in the kids in from the Burbank Unified School District to create art with the seniors.
EnGAGE founder Tim Carpenter worked in the healthcare industry when he teamed up with housing developer John Huskey to build this new type of senior living community. To start, they offered a creative writing class at one housing complex. From there, the reach of their services expanded, touching people who don’t live in the retirement communities, but are attracted to the arts programming that they offer.
“You have this great synergy of the physical amenities with the intellectual ones,” Carpenter tells NEA Arts Magazine. “And so that tends to be powerful within the community itself. It also becomes an attractor to people from the outside community…to have a place where people want to go to learn because it’s a beautiful building and there are interesting people living there.”
Caroline McElroy is an artist “in permanent residence” at the NoHo Senior Arts Colony in North Hollywood. She teaches a weekly collage class that’s scheduled to run 90 minutes, but often ends up lasting for hours as seniors get lost in their creations.
McElroy says that the Colony “is a place of possibilities. My son-in-law goes, ‘So how long do you plan on living here?’ and I said, ‘Honey, they’re going to have to carry me out of here.’”
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Tag: Innovations for the Elderly
How to Bridge the Digital Divide
While many claim that devices are causing people to interact less, here’s a great example of technology bringing people together.
Once a week, 16-year-old Mikinly Sullivan travels to the Frasier Meadows retirement home in Boulder, Colo., to visit her friend, 89-year-old Kevin Bunnell. The two were connected through Cyber Seniors, a program that pairs high school volunteers with elderly individuals that need help navigating new-fangled technology.
The program wants to ensure that seniors are learning to use computers — not just letting the young people figure things out for them — so as a rule, the elder person’s fingers must be on the keyboard the whole time, while the teenager coaches them through maneuvers.
Bunnell is a poet, and Sullivan has been helping him organize the many poems he’s written over his lifetime. “I love listening to the stories from when he was young,” Sullivan says to PBS News Hour. In exchange, Bunnell wrote a poem in honor of the Cyber Seniors program.
Another senior benefitting from the program is Bruce Mackenzie. “I’m taking a class at the university called Hip-Hop 101,” he says, “And I didn’t know how to listen to the rap songs that are on hip-hop. And Ryan [a teen participant] showed me how to go to YouTube, which I never knew anything about. So I go to YouTube now and I can listen to all these rap songs for my class.”
While the program’s ultimate mission is to help seniors get online, Jack Williamson, who runs Cyber Seniors, says that it “helps build relationships between young people and seniors, which is rare in this culture today.”
As one student volunteer tells PBS News Hour, “I’m learning a lot from them and they’re learning from me. I have actually found through this that I think I like older people more than I like younger people.”
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