As America becomes more age-diverse, higher education faces both a challenge and an opportunity: how to prepare students for success in our multigenerational society and how to remake institutions to serve people of all ages and life stages.

This webinar explores the emerging movement of cogeneration on college campuses, how older and younger are coming together to solve community problems, expand access to opportunity, and build stronger, more connected communities. You’ll hear insights from a new study by CoGenerate: Can Intergenerational Connection Heal Us? and stories from campuses reimagining how students, older adults, and community partners can collaborate with purpose. From student-led initiatives to institution-wide strategies, discover how colleges are embedding age-diverse connection into courses, housing, travel, and civic partnerships. Whether you’re a student, faculty member, or community innovator, this is your invitation to explore why generations belong together—and how your campus can lead the way. You’ll also hear from leaders across the country championing this work and learn how to get involved in the Campus CoGenerate Affinity Network, a growing community of leaders advancing innovation in higher education.

You’ll Learn:

• Why cogeneration matters in higher education now
• How campuses are bridging generational divides to spark connection and innovation
• What’s possible when institutions embed cogeneration across campus life
• How to join a national network rethinking the role of generations in education

Transcript (machine generated):

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Natalie Furlett 

All right, looks like we have a lot of people joining us, but I want to keep us on time, since we have a lot to share today, I’m Natalie. I am the Vice President for member and student engagement with Campus Compact, and we are excited to have you all here for our webinar today, which is campus innovation for multigenerational society. So for those of you who have been around Campus Compact for a little while, or CoGenerate, for that matter, you might have heard that we are doing a new partnership that we’re very excited about, and this is part of that partnership. So we have come together with the generous support of Met Life to create the campus CoGenerate affinity network to help turn campuses into hubs for cogenerational collaboration and learning. So America is the most age diverse society in history right now, and campuses have a lot of work they can do to become really instrumental in building relationships and networks that can drive personal and professional growth. Our conversation today will be moderated by Eunice Lin Nichols, the Co-CEO of CoGenerate. CoGenerate is a national organization bringing together older and younger people to solve problems, bridge divides, and co-create the future, just an FYI. We did have a small change up in our lineup today. Our representatives from Goucher College and the University of Texas El Paso could no longer make it, but luckily, Karen Morris from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago has graciously stepped in to share her experience in this work as well, and we’re excited to have her. So as they’re talking, feel free to put questions into the Q and A or the comment section. We’re happy to you know, we will be doing Q and A at the end, but if we can work them into the conversation, we will do that as well. You know, use the chat box to comment about things that are happening on your campus. Feel free to introduce yourself and tell us where you’re from, so we have an idea of who’s here. We are recording this session, and we’ll send out the recording with our follow up email, and we’ll include all the links and everything that we talk about today. So I am going to turn this over to Eunice now so we can start this amazing conversation. Thank you all for being here.

Eunice Lin Nichols 

Thank you, Natalie. What a pleasure to be here with all of you, and thank you Campus Compact for being the best collaborator and partner in this campus CoGenerate work. So welcome. We’re so glad you’re here. As Natalie mentioned, please put in the chat box where you are zooming in from. We’d love to know who’s in this space. We’re gathered at a moment of real transformation in higher education. As you know, campuses are confronting declining enrollment, aging infrastructure and a rapidly changing student body, and at the same time, we’re seeing something really hopeful, a movement that’s bubbling up across the country, one where generations are coming together, not just co existing, but with shared purpose to solve problems, exchange wisdom and reimagine what campus life can be. It’s what we call cogeneration. It’s really all about the CO or the with whether through intergenerational housing models that pair students with older neighbors, classroom experiences that bring generations into dialog with one another, or civic partnerships that build belonging across lines. This movement is really showing us that connection across generations isn’t just nice to have, it’s a necessary strategy for building resilience, for innovation and even institutional renewal. For so many of us, including those on this zoom panel, and certainly including me, this work is deeply personal. As a daughter of immigrants, I grew up in a multigenerational household. My grandparents were embedded in my life, and I didn’t need a name for it. It was just the way things were. It wasn’t until I went to college that I was thrown into a community where most of my experiences were curated for me to live, learn and socialize with other young people. But one of my formative experiences was getting to know an older resident and member of the local Baptist Church, and we started playing music together on Sunday mornings at that church, she was on organ and I was on violin, we had almost no life experiences in common, but our shared passion for music and the relationship that formed out of our weekly collaborations and then monthly meals that she would invite me to in her family home, expanded my capacity to connect across difference and gave me a new found understanding of who could feel like my family and what we could accomplish for the community together. But the reality is that my connection with Mrs. Dubendorf was really a do it yourself project. It was the exception, not the rule, and in particular, for my fellow peers, It did shape how I see the world and anchored me into the belief that we are better and stronger when generations walk alongside each other. So I’m particularly excited that Today we’ll have a chance explore what intentional cogeneration looks like, and we’ll see what it looks like in action on three college campuses, and why it matters now more than ever. So before I introduce our three amazing panelists, I do want to share a few insights from CoGenerate’s national study on social isolation and loneliness that I think are particularly relevant to higher ed in this moment, the report asks a provocative question, and we made it the title it’s called, can intergenerational connection heal us? And our friend Daniel was putting that in the chat box. Today, young people are experiencing unprecedented levels of loneliness, and meanwhile, older adults are becoming increasingly isolated as they age. It turns out, hundreds, if not 1000s of organizations are putting the puzzle pieces together to help these two generational bookends become each other’s solutions to their social isolation and loneliness. So in the fall of 2024 we set out to learn from organizations who are implementing cogenerational strategies as an antidote to that isolation and loneliness. We ended up surfacing nine findings from in depth, interviews with 41 experts and a community of practice of 167 organizations focused on making their work more cogenerational. As a side note, a quarter of those organizations were institutions that are doing work connected to higher ed or were college campuses themselves. So here are just a few highlights from that report, and then I encourage you to dig into all nine. The first one is that age gap friendships are in sometimes people think that older and younger people don’t want to be together. All of our research and interviews and even media today, if you’re following movies or news headlines, indicate the opposite. People, especially younger generations, are hungry for meaningful mutual relationships across age lines. These friendships are reshaping how we think about belonging, purpose and leadership, and these age gap friendships work because they help younger people see the long view and remind older adults that they’re still part of what’s next, that mutual recognition across time is powerful, especially in college settings designed to help students form their identity and shape their Future. The last insight that I want to share is that the future of cogenerational programming is all about the and it’s not a zero sum game, and there aren’t trade offs to be made. It isn’t a choice between small or large, virtual or in real life. It’s about younger and older together. It’s about small, medium and large. It’s about virtual and in person. Cogeneration is a strategy that can work in any setting. It’s like a tool that you can use. It’s about experimenting with what works best in your setting. There’s really no bad place to start. So you’ll see some of these insights come to life today through our conversation with our panelists. They are a dynamic group of higher education leaders, including several members of our campus CoGenerate Steering Committee. They’re part of a growing number of innovators who are really putting these ideas into action, from classrooms to community part to community partnerships. They’re really helping us to build a future that reflects the full age diversity of our society and that can unlock the potential of every generation. So with that, I’d like to kick off this conversation by inviting Markya Reed to join us. I wanted to start with somebody whose story brings this work to life. Markya is a student affairs professional at Johns Hopkins University. She’s also a PhD candidate in education at Morgan State University and an impact fellow with CoGenerate, and is serving on the steering committee. She’s serving as a steering committee member for the campus CoGenerate affinity network. So Markya is super busy, and she’s also really passionate about this work. Markya, you come to cogeneration from a powerful place of lived experience. I know that you grew up in a small rural town outside of Baltimore, and were the first in your family to go to college, and you’ve built a deep commitment to research and exploring how the civil rights movement and intergenerational advocacy intersect. So I wanted to start with you, because I think so many of us can relate to that moment of stepping onto a college campus for the first time. I still remember leaving my hometown in the Midwest and entering a whole new world, a new community, a new culture, new expectations. It was a feeling of disorientation and possibility. And I know a central question you’ve been asking is, how do we make sure campuses feel like places where people of all ages and experiences belong and can lead together? So can you take us back to those early days of stepping onto campus for the first time and tell us a little bit about how building intergenerational connections played a meaningful role in helping you feel a sense of belonging and purpose?

Markya Reed 

Of course. First I want to say that I’m so happy to be here. So when I think of when I first stepped on campus as an undergrad, many years ago, at this point, as you mentioned, I grew up in a very small rural town about two and a half hours south of Baltimore, 1000 people. I’m the eighth generation in that town, right? And so I felt very connected to that town. And all of a sudden, I’m in Baltimore, and I’m surrounded by people who seem to have seen so much more than me, who seem to know so much more than I do, who seem so connected. And while I was very excited to start. I did not feel connected at all at first, to my campus community, nor to Baltimore the city. And I remember wanting to be involved and not really knowing how to start. And so really my connection to Baltimore City, which, funny enough, I’m still here, and the reason why, I think, is because of those intergenerational connections, specifically through civil disobedience trainings. I don’t think everyone has that, you know, in that’s not everyone’s footing, but I was in school in 2015 when Freddie Gray was killed by the police in Baltimore City, and I distinctly remember feeling like I want to do something, like something’s bubbling up in not only the community, but the nation. But who am I? I’m a teenager. I don’t know how to be involved. And I remember standing on the seventh floor of our library on campus and looking out to Baltimore at the fires in Mondawmin Mall, and thinking, something is happening, something is changing. I want to be a part of that. And so I kind of just ventured out into Baltimore City to see what’s going on. And I remember going to this Methodist Church in West Baltimore where older folks from this community, it was around like Santa Winchester, West Baltimore community. We’re hosting the civil disobedience training in a basement for anyone who wanted to be involved. And I stumbled in, and there were students there from various campuses in Baltimore. There are older folks who lived in Baltimore who were talking about the history of their community, how much it meant to them and how they thought that we could move forward together as kind of like a coalition. And they were teaching us tactics. You know, folks who had been in anti war movements, the civil rights movement, were coming and sharing their stories, hoping that we could learn from that. And we held hands, and we like, said chants and prayers. And for the first time, I felt not only connected to my community, the Black community, but also to Baltimore City. And I remember thinking like, I want so badly to stay here and to learn from the people around me, and I did, like, a decade later, right? I’m still here, and I love Baltimore so much, and being in a space where people were able to kind of impart wisdom onto me and make me feel empowered to make change in the community was was huge. It was everything to me.

Eunice Lin Nichols 

I love that story, Markya, and I’m struck by how you sought out the wisdom of longtime residents and older neighbors. People really understood the community’s history and power structures and then learned alongside them. And I’m guessing when they threw the especially the olders through that training really had probably learned the the tactics and the fortitude for civil disobedience and the civil rights era. Probably they were so overjoyed when young people showed up, because they know they can’t do it alone, and they need to do it with other other folks of other generations, so you’re part of that legacy, and it echoes the themes in the social isolation and the loneliness report that these age gap friendships and relationships work in part because they illuminate life’s longer journey. They help do you see beyond the moment your need to go, do something, to take action, and they probably reminded the older adults that they are really needed as part of what’s next. So I know right now you’ve gone on to become a student affairs professional and a PhD candidate, and that you have a strong interest in research and social justice. So how does CoGenerate show – cogeneration show up today in your approach to research or your work with students and the community? What are some ways you’ve been able to shift from kind of our more common culture of one-directional mentoring to the practice of generations working together for the common good?

Markya Reed 

I think for me, especially my graduate journey, both in my master’s program, previously and currently in my PhD program, I’ve really been gravitating toward community based, participatory research, which is just a method that we can use to involve all members, whether that’s, in my case, Baltimore community, in all processes of research. So we’re identifying the question together. We’re figuring out the solutions together. It’s more so research “with” instead of research “for.” And I was introduced to this in my master’s program where I worked with my professor in two South Baltimore communities, Brooklyn and Curtis Bay, specifically to figure out what was the experience of older adults living in those communities, who were say, aging in place. What do they love about theircommunities? You know, what was challenging for them? Where do they go the most? Where do they wish they could go? And so that involved me talking to a lot of folks in those communities, sitting in people’s homes, hearing their life stories and having them kind of work with me and my professor to figure out what, um, what do they need, you know, and all of that data that we all worked on together and analyzed together, um was used by a local nonprofit called Action Baybrook, who then applied for grants. And the the point of the grant was to get money to improve the lives of older people in those neighborhoods. And so I remember this one particular man. He was a young, well, I think he was maybe in the 60s or so, but he was from Jamaica, and that was the longest interview I had. I remember coming to his house being really nervous about it, because I didn’t know him. We were just going door to door, and I just sat in his living room with him for what seemed like two hours or so, just talking about his life and all he had seen over the past, like 30 years in Baltimore, how his neighborhood was changing, and how he was an artist, and he really wanted to put like these sculptures in the park across the street. And I think this also plays into why I’m still here, right in Baltimore City. It’s like I learned so much from talking to just community members in general about their experiences and about the history of Baltimore. I’m big fan of history, as you mentioned in the civil rights so it’s like really thinking deeply about where has Baltimore been, how has the community shaped that the people who already did that, like, how can I do that too? And talking to folks and being a part of that research project in particular was really helpful and eye opening to me, because we were able to co create something together. And I don’t think there are a lot of opportunities to do that. So in my PhD program, I’m trying to figure out a way to do the same thing where I’m not like thinking of the research question myself, but I’m working with people of different walks of life and ages to figure out a research question, and we can figure out that answer for the community together.

Eunice Lin Nichols 

I love that. I’ve been really moved by the idea that intergenerational work requires a different kind of research approach and the participatory method. I was not that familiar with until I met Do you know dr Ayana handy at Drexel University? I want to introduce you to her. I don’t know if she’s on the call today. She runs the joy lab and has done a lot of participatory research on intergenerational programming in particular. And I was struck. I was attending a session where she was presenting on some of that research, and she refused to do it without bringing she brought, like 10 or 15 older adults from the programs, from Philadelphia to this Conference in Baltimore. She said, we can’t present the research without because they are researchers. Though they were part of the programs, they are the ones who are also collecting information, and it felt so different to hear about the impact and the insights from the research with the older adults who are part of it, and then the grad students as well. And so even the presentation is kind of a more academic setting was intergenerational, and it made it feel really personal, in a way where academia can often feel a little bit, I don’t know, more And so I love the fact that you’re leaning into this. It’s wonderful. So okay, as a student leader and an academic researcher and your formal role right now in student affairs, what’s a bold idea or a tangible way you’d like to see institutions of higher education invest in cogenerational experiences that could be game changing. So it’s not such a do it yourself project, that it’s not like you’re standing on a building looking out, being like, maybe there’s something out there, for me, where it actually is built into the structure more.

Markya Reed 

I think that what I have seen various campuses doing. So it’s not necessarily a new idea, but I do think it’s very niche on many campuses, is community based learning courses that have community members as Co-educators in that space is real, and it is. And so I think creating more environments where everyone can be co educators together, and we are valuing that lived experience piece just as much as the credentials, is something I’m interested in. And community based learning courses on college campuses tend to do that very well. Now, if we can get that structured on multiple campuses and have more funding toward that, I think that would be ideal, and perhaps it could. It could build a bridge between community and university, especially in places like Hopkins, right where the relationship hasn’t always been so positive. I think it could build some trust.

Eunice Lin Nichols 

I love that. I love that so much. And a lot of our research shows that when you let young people know that part of their experience will be robust collaboration with older folks, they’re building their networks. They’re getting that lived experience. It’s actually a draw. And so that kind of community based learning, I think would be really attractive to younger and older students alike. Thank you so much, Marcia, for rooting us in both the student experience and your journey from being a student to being part of the institution and the educational learning process, and for sharing some of your vision for cogeneration and higher ed spaces. You know, you can go off camera, but don’t go too far, because we’re going to ask you back for the Q and A later.

Markya Reed 

Thank you so much.

Eunice Lin Nichols 

Thank you also, reminder to folks, if you have questions, stick it in the Q and A box, and at the end, we’ll have time to answer as many of them as we can. All right, now I want to bring in Karen Morris, who I have to say a huge thank you to, she’s pinch hitting for Matt van Hoos from Goucher and Jennifer Luhan from University of Texas at El Paso. So you are two people in one, but I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with you before, and I know that you can definitely bring it. So Karen is a cultural anthropologist at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. She’s the co founder of the LGBTQ+  Intergenerational Dialogue Project, which is a partnership between want to get this right, the School of Art Institute of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago, the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice at the University of Chicago, and the center on Halstead, which is a local LGBTQ community center. So Karen’s work brings younger and older adults from the LGBTQ+ community into meaningful, sustained conversation with one another. This project is helping participants across generations feel seen, heard and connected. Often for the first time, I had a chance to get to know Karen when she joined the community of practice for our cogeneration as solutions to social isolation loneliness, initiative, and was blown away by her creativity. So Karen, your work beautifully illustrates how intergenerational connection can be both healing and transformative, helping participants really engage with each other. Can you tell us about how the project you’ve been working on came to be, both what sparked the idea and what needs to happen to get the level of complex partnership and collaboration going that you’ve made happen.

Karen Morris 

Yeah, it’s funny. And by the way, I loved listening to Markya because we share so many similar like approaches and stuff that I just I loved kind of seeing different folks doing these work in different settings. Different settings, you know, what it is today, which we’re in our seventh year now, is much different than when it started, you know. So now it’s a partnership between a multiple, you know, things we have. And so I think, I think kind of, if you had told me seven years ago that it would look like what it looks like today, I would have had no idea – no way of like understanding that. And so it’s really kind of emerged organically, grown organically over time. So in 2018 2019 a colleague and I at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago were talking, and we had noticed that most of our LGBTQ students, college students, master students, did not know that LGBTQ older adults existed, and we also found that a lot of them thought that they would not live past 40 because they had like no models. At the same time, we had been doing work at the LGBT community center near us with LGBTQ older adults, and had found that they really felt forgotten by the generations that have come since then of LGBTQ folks. They felt disconnected from the LGBT community. They wanted to help younger folks with activism, because many of them had been activists, but they had no idea how. So really, it started as this experiment. So we met with somebody we knew that was at the community center, and it was just the three of us, and we were like, what would happen if we just found a way to get them together, some younger folks and older folks, you know, feed them, water them, and get out of the way and just see what happens. And because it just doesn’t happen, you know, as we know, intergenerational connection is often not happening in the US, especially with LGBTQ folks. It happens even less often, because we are seldom born into families or communities that have out elders, our society, our educational institutions have really kept LGBTQ adults and older adults away from youth. So it was really just like, let’s see what happens. And so we got a little seed money from our school. So Adam and I, who are my collaborator, we went to our Dean of community engagement. I said, we want to kind of start doing this. Could you just, like, basically, know about it. Could we use the institutional resources, like the copy machines, you know, these, that’s what’s wonderful about already being in, you know, in an in a school, and we were able to get a little bit of seed money. And the seed money was basically for feeding people. And so we announced, it was very informal. We kind of announced in our classes, we’re starting this crazy thing. Tell us if you’re interested. And the senior center announced it to their folks, and that’s how it started. And then over time, you know, we got through covid. We thought with covid it was going to have to shut down because it’s all in person, but it became clear that actually the need was greater during covid. People really, really needed to connect. So we actually went from weekly meetings to bi weekly meetings during covid. Over time, then it’s just grown by basically what’s been directed from folks that are in the project. So students asked us, could you make a class this is really help us be able to fit it into our schedules, be able to commit to it, and also we don’t understand a lot of what the older adults are talking about. So it is now a two part class, a fall class and a spring class. In the fall class, the students meet. We rotate one week the students in a seminar, one week with the intergenerational group, and we do this, and we have a two week segment, so we’ll maybe we’ll do a section of LGBTQ activism or and we make all the materials accessible, because we’re learning along with the older adults who for them, it’s often their first time being an educational environment that’s talking about LGBTQ history and issues. And so all of our syllabus is very is made to be super accessible for the older adults as well as younger so we’ll talk, we’ll learn about things, and then we’ll talk about it. And so that’s kind of how it started. The classes is what then made it sustainable, I think, for us, and, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s wonderful, and it’s a lot of work, because half of the students are enrolled students, and half of the students are not enrolled in their older adults. So we’re kind of teaching, you know, 30 instead of 15. So to have it be part of our course load, which we propose courses, is one way that it’s been more sustainable for us, because it then counted as one of my course loads in the fall. In the spring, when I started, I was just doing it on top of stuff which was difficult.

Eunice Lin Nichols 

Yeah, well, it’s something we often hear is just how scrappy people need to be to get things off the ground. And I’m also interested in and how, how you feel, the program can kind of get embedded in a longer term, way over time. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Karen Morris 

Yeah. I mean, we think about that all the time, because then over time, then we started as two faculty. We added two more faculty from different institutions. We now have an intergenerational team that facilitates the two youngers over time. It’s organically come that people in the project call themselves elders and youngers that really came out of the group and and so we have two youngers on the team, two elders on the team. We talk about that a lot because now we’re in the seventh year, and it’s, it’s, it’s a lot, you know, right? It’s emotional labor, it’s organizational labor, it’s all sorts of stuff. And I think funding is, as a lot of people will say, a big one. We had got a research grant, which we’re finishing, and so that’s one that’s making us think about what’s next. We’re also playing with ways that we could include people that are not able to be college students and that also can’t commit to nine months of week meetings every week or every two weeks. And so we’re playing with. that in terms of sustainability, how do we both reach those people in the community and also, how do we do it in ways that are less heavy lifts to kind of reach more people? So we’ve started doing programming in Chicago public libraries. We just did an event at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. We’ve also started a short like mini dialogue, where it’s just four meetings at U Chicago, University of Chicago that brings South Side elders in. So we’re really thinking about that long term sustainability, especially as we’re finishing our grant and we’re coming out of money. So I think it’s, you know, but I think for people that are faculty on and staff on campuses, one of the big ways is getting it as a course. I think that really works, because then your students can actually commit to it as well.

Eunice Lin Nichols 

Yeah, yeah. That makes a ton of sense. I want to ask kind of a question from a different angle, which is that oftentimes when people think about intergenerational work, or like, oh, a dialogue project, like people will talk, and somehow it feels warm and fuzzy. We also look at this other side, where intergenerational work actually builds social capital. It can actually help younger and older people take a step up in life. Can you, do you have a story or an example of how that works with with the dialogue project?

Karen Morris 

Sure, and I like the idea of social capital. This idea of, kind of, by somehow building communicate, building social networks and connections, right? And makes for a stronger community, especially the idea of bridging the social capital that’s bridging. So bridging divides, crossing with our ours. We’re really conscious that it’s bridging generational divides within LGBT communities, but it’s also building racial we’re crossing racial divides, which are big divides in the community, as well as class divides. And so I think that has that’s something that can really strengthen the community. So one of my things I was kind of thinking about, and it connects with Markya was activism. But then there’s been, you know, other ways too, and one is in the idea of something else  Markya was talking about, is this idea of coming together in terms of producing knowledge, whether it’s through research, the dialogue project has become a research project over time, because people kept saying, This isn’t happening. Can you document it? Can you write about it? And through that, then it’s become very much what how Markya described it as in all the people in the project are researchers, and they’re coming in at different times. And I think this idea that LGBTQ people, especially are usually never in education or research settings where it’s focused on us, much less we’re the ones driving it. So the faculty are now the facilitators, and it’s really the people within that are that are driving it. So that includes like grants. So we had one story is we had an elder who joined the project six years ago. She just turned 80 in the last year, but she joined the project six years ago. And one thing that we do is we, we also, when we run events like we also hold events in bars in terms of getting into the community. So we do queer elder panels. We bring in for queer elders, they tell stories, or bring in some of the youngers. They tell stories together, and it’s usually a younger audience. When we first started doing these things at libraries, at bars, the elders were really worried that nobody would come. Nobody wanted to hear them, and especially for some of the events, nobody would pay to come hear them. And those experiences of having those intergenerational connections and realizing they’re part of this community, and then youngers coming up to them afterwards and wanting to connect with them, wanting their emails, wanting these things, I think, really empowered the entire community. So this one older adult I’m thinking of like she was, you know, very worried in the beginning, and then I think this has become such a huge part of her to see that she is important and that she also has meaning in these younger people’s lives, and she can help with them. So when we were applying for grants, we had several, you know, folks that say, you know, I want to be help with the grant application. They’re writing letters, and then we find out this one grant we applied to, we wouldn’t get find out for 10 months. And I remember distinctly her going tell them, I’ll be dead. I might be dead by then. Like, they need to, like, hurry up. But I think one thing too is the level of investment of realizing this project is their project, the research is their research. has really been a turn in terms of empowering our communities, that it’s through our social networks and the empowering of lived experience. And what Markya was saying that everybody is an expert, right? And everybody brings in this knowledge that has really, I think, empowered the community that we’re working with. And one of the reasons that as a community grows each year, now, we have over 160 people that have been through nine months of the program. They we don’t go away like we just had an event at the museum, and a bunch of they all came to support each other. So there were some featured folks, but everybody else was there, which was great, because then, when we didn’t have enough elders, there were more young people. I’m like, hold on, there’s more over there. There’s more over there. So, you know? And so I think it’s this thing of, yeah, that empowerment. And I think the other neat thing is, within the research is this coming year, we’re going to start writing a book, and we have four research symposiums coming up, and those symposiums always bring in researchers, co researchers, but the researchers we’re bringing in and compensating are alums of the project, and so they’re the researchers who are coming in and analyzing the data and figuring out how we should write.

Eunice Lin Nichols 

that’s great. I love that on so many levels, the this kind of almost cyclicality of the way the work happens, and I get this picture of almost kind of lifelong connections and friendships that form over time. People stay in touch and they show up for each other, and that ripple effect of social capital built into the generational lineage is so important and something that both young and older folks are really desperate for right now. Yeah, thank you so much, Karen for joining us, and I’m gonna call you back later for the Q and A so don’t go far. All right, I am now really excited to introduce Lindsey Beagley, the Senior Director of lifelong University engagement at Arizona State University. Lindsey has played a key role in advancing intergenerational efforts that not only welcome older adults onto campus, literally onto campus, living on campus, but embedding them into the very fabric of university life. I have learned as much about this space from Lindsey as anybody else. She’s a real leader, and she’s helped make cogeneration an intentional part of ASU’s long term strategy, helping them to reimagine higher ed as a place to live and learn across life stages. So Lindsey, can you take us back to the beginning of this long journey you’ve been on at ASU? What were you and your team hoping to build with Mirabella ASU, university based retirement community, and what’s been the broader cogenerational vision? What surprised you?

Lindsey Beagley 

Thank you so much, we’ve learned so much in the last six or seven years. Well, you know, just to start, you know, Mirabella is a 20 story high rise retirement community right on the corner of campus. So visually, I mean, it’s disrupting our idea of what even the campus looks like, right? But it also, structurally, I think, overcomes a lot of the challenges with cogenerational work, which is proximity. And I think you know, so many of the challenges are often like, how do I recruit younger people, or how do I get in touch with older people? And where do I even promote these things? And I know you and Marc often talk about housing and education are two of these things that have contributed so much to structural age segregation. So in many ways, university retirement communities are this intervention to overcome that structural age segregation and close the physical, geographical proximity issue between youngers and olders, and I think it also closes the perceived gap between youngers and olders, because at Mirabella, all of the residents receive a student ID card. So not only does that mean they have access to everywhere on campus that a student does, but it also creates a sense of belonging. And I think, you know, one of the things we forget is that, for many historical reasons, universities have long focused on young people, and it what that means is the older learners don’t always feel welcome. They don’t always feel a sense of belonging on campus. And so what we’ve really had to do is make sure that these folks feel that they are part of campus, that they can go into campus spaces, that they can talk to faculty and engage with students and and embed themselves, um, naturally and organically. So, so it overcomes that proximity issue. It overcomes, you know, the sense of belonging. But I think also Mirabella and university retirement communities in general, are these mechanisms, you know, they’re self sustaining. They are revenue generating mechanisms. And when we talk about this moment in higher education where universities are having to be more entrepreneurial. Their their traditional sources of funding are have been disrupted, have been dissolved. They have to think differently about, how do we think differently about how to sustain our operations? The University retirement communities are a one, one innovation to do that. So that’s kind of the big picture of of Mirabella at ASU. And what was your other question about?

Eunice Lin Nichols 

Oh, well, I’m gonna, I’m gonna just put in the chat an amazing article that Lindsey wrote with one of our impact fellows, Simon Chan. It’s called, What is it’s like longevity Boom?

Lindsey Beagley 

yeah, enrollment economic cliff, meet longevity boom.

Eunice Lin Nichols 

Yeah, it is probably one of the best clear arguments for why higher ed really needs to care about the longevity boom from an economic perspective. So give that a read. Lindsey. One of the things that we highlighted in the social isolation loneliness report was this concept that when you bring generations together, conflict is inevitable. I want to say on the other side the conflict is worth it, because we actually really need to learn how to do conflict better. Can you share, just to ground us in, like an example of that happened pretty early here, and what has happened on the other side of the conflict?

Lindsey Beagley 

Yeah, thank you for that. You know, I’m going to tell you a tale. And I think, you know, a lot has changed in 45 years. I think in the zeitgeist we are, we are a little bit more open to this idea of university retirement communities. But so we opened December 2020, which is, which is very stressful time, as you recall, certainly for senior living communities, but we had to open because so many folks had sold their homes to move in, and so, you know, we forged forward. And what I think nobody had pieced together was, at the time, there was a ramen restaurant right across the street that had had a use permit to play electronic dance music till 2am and they were shut, you know, they were closed to as a music venue, as were all bars and restaurants that were in music venues. And so when they returned, by that point, there were multiple high rises that had been built up, including Mirabella, so hotels and apartment buildings. And this particular restaurant is like a courtyard conflict, an open air courtyard concept. So what had happened is that, when they resumed, electronic dance music is known for its base, its heavy base, and so the base would would like shoot up the sides of these high rise buildings and reverberate like the shake the top floors. And so at this, at its core, this conflict was a sound engineering problem, okay, and perhaps also a zoning problem that’s inherent to all, I think, rapidly growing cities. And, you know, this was extremely demoralizing for me, because, and not only is this, you know, an obvious win win. I mean, I am witnessing the incredible intergenerational connections that are happening, particularly around music and the arts. As you, as you mentioned, this is, you know, I’m seeing residents and students connect, and they’re working on projects together, and they’re learning together. And yet, in the media, what’s being covered is just the most ageist, narrow, stale narrative you’ve ever heard, which is universities are for young people and who let older people come to campus, and I wanted to scream like we did, you know, and there’s a good reason for it, because we’re seeing all these positive outcomes with students. So it revealed for me that, you know, this work is not without its challenges. We are we are pushing against a perhaps century old narrative that universities are for young people. They are designed to help people graduate and get jobs and nothing more. But if you believe that narrative, your university is probably not doing well right now. So I think, you know, we were one of the, I think the first sort of innovations to confront that narrative and to start to put new stories out there, to say, look at all the interesting, important and valuable things that older adults are doing on campus. They’re connecting with students. They’re helping them graduate. They’re addressing loneliness and isolation. They’re working on research together with students. They are doing social impact projects with students. But unless you have an engine to put those new narratives out there, these old stone still, narratives will persist.

Eunice Lin Nichols 

Yeah, I think storytelling has been a big part of what you’ve been doing, and I think not just doing the work on campus, but also I think it’s why thought leadership has been so important for you and for Mirabella and ASU in general. I’d love to get a little practical. There are some folks on this call who may be thinking about starting something cogenerational on their campus, maybe for the first time, given the journey you’ve been on, what’s your best advice on how to lay the groundwork and how to stay the course.

Lindsey Beagley 

Yeah, well, I’ll be the first person to tell you I don’t think university retirement communities are the only solution, and in fact, they’re not feasible for a lot of institutions. So I just want to call that that, that really the advice is looking at your campus, your institution, and figuring out what is repurpose of what can you open up to older people? What already exists, what assets, what campus experiences, what facilities already exist, that you can open up and carve pathways for older adults to participate in. So this is not you know. Let’s find funding to invest in a whole new thing and build something from scratch. Nobody has the capacity to do that right now, but what we do have the capacity to do is repurpose existing assets. So I would say that that’s number one. And then, you know, realizing the the the benefit of doing this, I’ll tell you a 30-second story that I tell to explain the value of doing this for students, we have one resident who is, she’s her name is Karen. She’s 86 years old, and she was taking a class called Sustainable Worlds. And she came back from class one day and told me the story that you know, this lecture was about all of these promising innovations that will help us tackle climate change, and she was so impressed and felt so hopeful that she leaned over next to her and to talk to the classmate next to her and just be like, Wow. Wasn’t this amazing? Aren’t isn’t so exciting. And she was surprised to see that he had the opposite reaction, that he was overwhelmed and stressed and like, couldn’t he was paralyzed by the tremendous task before us with climate change. And for 15 or 20 minutes after class, they talked about, how is it possible that both of us have such different perspectives on the same lecture? And of course, what’s happening here is that Karen is deepening her empathy for this young man and the overwhelm that he and many people in his generation feel about the task of the thorny problems that they have to solve. And of course, this young man is borrowing from Karen her resilience. She’s 86 she’s seen some things in her life, and she’s persisted, and yet she’s so hopeful. And so this is the kind of magic. This is the kind of connectivity that you cannot fabricate. You know this happens when two people from different generations find themselves in the same spaces and are connecting around things they care about.You can’t make that happen, but what you can do is find ways to put them together.

Eunice Lin Nichols 

Love that. All right, I want to be cognizant of time, so I want to invite Markya, and I want to invite Karen back to join us, and we’re going to try and tackle a couple of questions. All three of you have such some similarities, started throughout, but are really at different kinds of institutions of higher education. So for our audience, this is your chance to try and get a question in. But I’m going to start with some of the ones that have already been posted. Already been posted in the Q and A box. Okay, the first one from Marine Colin Taylor is, I think this came up Markya, when you were talking Can you share who to approach to find students to collaborate on intergenerational projects? And I think that Lindsey, you had said one benefit of university based retirement communities is the proximity. But maybe if you don’t have that, how else can you if you’re if you’re an organization with a bunch of older adults wanting to do an intergenerational project, how do you connect with students? open to answers from anybody here. Markia?

Markya Reed 

the first thing that comes to mind for me in finding students, I think it’s especially as students are about to come to campus for the summer, is finding incoming students, transfer students, freshmen, who are looking to be involved in the community in any way. I think that that’s where you find a lot of you find a lot of open minds because they’re new. They just want to do something and be involved and learn about their their new environment. But also, I think that you can find a lot of interested students via student organizations. There are a lot of student organizations that are intergenerational, and we might not think of them in that way, but they do exist. So I would suggest perhaps looking through your list of student orgs to see who’s doing what, and in touching base with those students,

Lindsey Beagley 

I would second that. I would say service learning programs that are already seeking to be community based, and community engagement offices. I can’t remember. I think Karen had mentioned the dean of community engagement. Typically, there’s some kind of office of community, community engagement at institutions. And what I think is important here is the opportunity to see who are we even talking about when we say engaging older people. Because unfortunately, our mental models take us right to, like, end of life, and what could possibly be the collaboration between somebody who’s at the very end of their life. But the opportunity here is realizing, because of longer lives, we have older people who are so active, so engaged, so curious, so sharp, so valuable. Like we just we. There’s so much opportunity that we almost have to see who we’re talking about to even begin that creative thinking.

Eunice Lin Nichols 

Absolutely. Thank you for that. It’s a it’s a good reminder that proximity, just kind of having somebody in the vicinity, isn’t enough. You actually have to know the ways to connect, and I think Karen and others have mentioned just telling your stories. Higher Ed is so deeply siloed, structurally within itself and the community engagement folks don’t often know the academic research folks who probably don’t know the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute folks or the service learning people. So some of it is, if you get into this work, you will become a bridge between all these factors, and that’s kind of part of becomes part of the job, part of the adventure. Let’s say, Okay, there’s a question about community colleges, and a vision for how they might fit into this cogenerational conversation, both community colleges, including those in rural regions, this person says, So many are not thinking about 50 plus year olds as potential students. Do any of you have interactions with community colleges or have thoughts on that? Any takers? There? If not, then, oh, go ahead,

Karen Morris 

don’t. Oh, go ahead. Lindsey, I don’t, I think one thing we keep trying to do is stand who we are, engaging, you know, which often just happens, if we happen to, you know, find someone. Because I think that’s a great question. Because I think also there, you know, the kind of the already for us. We’re working across an art and design College, a private research university and a public research university, and just those different populations are really great to bring together. So I would love that. I would almost think maybe for community colleges to maybe reach out and make connections with other institutions that are already there. I’m liking the I’m really liking the advice that’s been happening in this call in terms of like, not reinventing the wheel necessarily, but looking out and seeing like, who’s doing X like, or where there’s a group of students that might be so in this case, I might say for community colleges to reach out, if you see folks doing that work at institutions, at other local institutions, I think that would be awesome.

Eunice Lin Nichols 

Yeah

Lindsey Beagley 

I was just gonna say I think community colleges have a distinct advantage in that the culture of these colleges embraces older learners, more so than four year universities. And so the recommendation I would give is to look into your state to see if you have some kind of program that gives retirees free access to university level courses. I think there’s only about four or five states that don’t permit this. It doesn’t mean they have good processes for granting retirees access to college courses, but most states have some kind of program, so I would start there, and oftentimes they’re to the community college courses.

Eunice Lin Nichols 

Yeah, I also feel like in a well, there are two things, two thoughts in my head. One is, I agree Lindsey, I think community colleges, there’s I actually think a lot we can learn from community colleges. And would love our team to think about how we might host another campus CoGenerate webinar focused on community colleges. I think the work may feel less like enrichment or outside of school, there are so many opportunities to build it into the classroom experience and probably already happening, as well as connections with internships and workforce prepping people for a multigenerational work environment, which is already happening on campus. So that’s a commitment to do something on that front and so let’s, let’s keep that one going. Another question I have is actually somebody who asked the flip side of the question about, How do I find young people, which is, let’s say you’re a student on campus, or you teach a lot of young people, and you’re like, I would really like to connect with older folks, and I don’t know how to make that happen. What’s your advice for that? Once again, if you don’t happen to have a retirement community right there on campus, if you have to do a little extra work?

Karen Morris 

Again, I would say you look, and I don’t know, I think it could be hard if you can’t find anything on your campus, right? They necessarily, you know, that’s doing that is to look in the area you are, like, I know, in like our city, there’s what did it call big brothers. There’s a, you know, YMCA program where you can be, you can be matched with somebody, and especially if you have certain interests, you can actually ask, if there’s somebody with those interests, there’s, there’s a program. There are several organizations that also will match people in the area. So I’m thinking Perfect Pairs is one of them that will, that will match like an older and a younger person if you let them know your area. But I think also organizations that are serving elders. So for me, our LGBT community center has a really robust Senior Services Center. So you can volunteer to to work in the computer, computer informational kind of teaching, or you can volunteer to to help serve lunches. So looking for, I think, organizations in your community that are working with older people and then offering to volunteer. Mm.

Eunice Lin Nichols 

Mm. Yeah, one of my favorite stories is of a student from Bowdoin College, Maya Lam, who did just that. She volunteered at a local senior community, and she said she went in, I think was a program called, like, house calls for the homebound, or something like that, where she would like, Go, and in her mind, she was like, I’m gonna go sit next to these older people and I’m gonna serve them. And then when she got to know them. She’s like, Oh my goodness, the program really should be older folks helping you know, lonely, homesick students feel more connected. And then her friends started saying, why can’t I get some older folks in my life like you have? So she started a Dear Abby like advice column in her school paper, where she would gather questions from her peers, and then she’d go over to the community center, where she was interacting with all these older adults, get their collective advice, and then put it in the paper, and it was hugely popular. So once again, just like getting connected through what feels like service, but then realizing you might be being served too, is a huge part of it. Okay, we have a minute left before I want to hand things back to Natalie. So we’re going to do a final lightning round. This is your chance to say whatever has been not said yet. I would encourage you to either for those on the call who are maybe tentative about getting and getting started, might want a place to start, or need some encouragement, or if you just have a big idea that you haven’t shared yet for how to make this work really embedded in higher ed, feel free to share it. Let’s start with Lindsey.

Lindsey Beagley 

Okay, there is a global movement called Age Friendly University Global Network. Some of you may be members or maybe part of member institutions, but these are institutions across the entire world that are realizing they need to expand their learning offerings to older learners, and are have subscribed to 10 Principles and how to do that. And so I would direct everyone, if you are looking to make connections with institutions, to go to Afugn.org, and see if there’s university nearby that has declared themselves age friendly, and we can help you get in contact with whoever applied for that designation. And so that way, that would might be one in road for you to make a connection with an institution that wants to make a connection with you,

Eunice Lin Nichols 

wonderful Karen, let’s go to you next.

Karen Morris 

I would say for anybody, yeah, thinking about wanting to start something to start small, like start really small. Be patient, be flexible, let it grow. And talk to folks, if you can, who are doing that kind of work in other places to kind of be in K so my kind of big dream is that you know, some big, major funding organization decides to launch something where they offer mini grants that come along with fellowships for folks that want to start something at a university or a college that can then hook them up with people so they have some seed money and start. But the main thing is small, like, if I had started by thinking I’m going to part with all these schools, like never. So it’s just like small, start small and go with it.

Eunice Lin Nichols 

Great. Markya, we’re going to end with you.

Markya Reed 

I’d say – how do figure out what’s already in community. There are so many people who are already doing this kind of work that might not even realize that it’s cogenerational or intergenerational, and so looking inward at what you already have is a great start. Also, on top of that, I would say, I think a lot of this is about relationship building. So find an organization that you really connect with and talk to them, build a relationship with them, introduce that organization to your students, because at the end of the day, our universities are not, you know, silos, they’re part of a larger community.

Eunice Lin Nichols 

Thank you. All right, over to you, Natalie, tell us how we can get more involved in campus CoGenerate, because that’s another way to stay connected.

Natalie Furlett 

Yeah. Well, thank you all so so much for your time today. This has been really, really amazing conversation. I want to thank everybody for putting all this information in the chat. There have been so many great suggestions and websites, so we will try and capture all of that. I also want to say huge thank you to Daniel Lopez and Cristina Rodriguez, who, behind the scenes, made this happen. So campus CoGenerate is our affinity network. If you’re interested in that, we’re going to put a link in the chat about, oh, there it is. How to get involved. It is for members of Campus Compact. But if you are interested in partnering in any way. We also put the campus [email protected] Please feel free to reach out. And before you head out, we do want to launch a quick poll just to see how you all felt about this. And so you know, after today’s session, do you feel inspired to bring younger and older generations together on campus? So thank you so much to those of you who are answering. And I just, I just want to say thank you. Thank you again to everyone, and we will share all of the resources that were talked about today in the follow up email. So thank you so much.