Want to connect across generations? Join us:

A new report from CoGenerate, Can Intergenerational Connection Heal Us?, reveals the critical role that hundreds, if not thousands, of community organizations play in bringing generations together to reduce social isolation and loneliness while providing connection, collaboration, friendship and healing.

Panelists include:

• Janet Oh, Sr. Director, Innovation & Programs at CoGenerate
• Serena Worthington, Sr. Program Officer at RRF Foundation for Aging
• Trish Lopez, founder and CEO of Teeniors
• Edie Lerner, Director of Chapters at Perfect Pair
• Karen Morris, Director, LGBTQ+ Intergenerational Dialogue Project
• Georgia Lacey and Casey Wheeler, participants in the LGBTQ+ Intergenerational Dialogue Project

Transcript (machine generated):

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Janet Oh  

Hi, everyone, welcome. I’m Janet Oh and I direct Innovation and Programs at CoGenerate. And we are a national nonprofit dedicated to bringing generations together to solve problems and bridge divides. And I’m so excited to welcome you to our event today, exploring intergenerational solutions to loneliness. So last fall, we held a community of practice, and we had 167 leaders from organizations that are interested in starting or growing their efforts to bring generations together to reduce social isolation and loneliness. And during this time, we also conducted 41 in depth interviews with experts in loneliness, nonprofit and foundation leaders and people who participate in intergenerational programs and at the start of this webinar, the images that you are seeing are from a report that we just released that summarizes basically everything that we learned. And takes an important step beyond the problem to shine a light on cogenerational solutions, specifically the hundreds, if not 1000s of community organizations across the country that are bringing generations together to reduce social isolation and loneliness, and today we’re going to hear from three leaders of intergenerational programs and two program participants, as well as a funder who believes in the importance of this work. So I love seeing all of you introduce yourself in the chat. Please continue to do that. I saw that we had people from Algeria and South Africa and Canada and all over the US. So really excited to have you here. You can put your questions, which we’ll have time for in the Q and A in Zoom, and we’ll get to that after we hear from our speakers. So I’d like to first introduce to you Karen Morris, and Karen is the co founder and director of the LGBTQ+ Intergenerational Dialog Project, and her project brings together racially, socio, economically and gender diverse cohorts of LGBTQ+ college students and older adults 60 plus, for a year long series of dialogs creative work and shared dinners. And Duncan, my colleague, and I had the great fortune of joining one of these dialogs in Chicago a few months ago, and we got to see the vibrant and vulnerable exchange across generations in person and Karen, that was so moving for me. So the first question I have for you, Karen is that the report highlights the hundreds of organizations that are doing this work, many of them small and hyper local. Can you talk to us about how you thought about growth for the work that you’re doing?

Karen Morris  

Sure. Um, first of all, I love the report, and I really appreciated the focus on the small and hyper local and the idea that scaling up is not necessarily the goal or sometimes the best thing for us. We’re we just are completing the sixth year of the Dialog Project. And I know in the first few years, there were two of us, my colleague and co founder of the project, Adam Greteman, and I running it. And I really worried that how small scale that it was, the folks that we were directly like working with, because we wanted, like, meaningful, long term, sustained engagement for folks over four to eight months at a time, and there were only two of us that were kind of doing all the background. We could really only bring in 30 people each fall, 15 youngers and 15 elders. And I kept saying, like, oh, but you know, we’re only reaching, like we’re all this work, and we’re only reaching a few number of people. And I was really grateful that Adam kept saying, No, this is what we’re doing. Is like we have, is we can only do it well, to do it this way, but also it’s enough, it will reach and and and so what’s cool is, to me, to see is now, six years later, we have directly engaged for at least four to eight months, over 150 people from the Chicago, Greater Chicago area, younger and elder, LGBTQ folks, and besides that, that they take it into their communities so much of the time, and they will tell us that they take what’s what we’re doing into their communities. I will get, like, text with images, or something like look an intergenerational, really friendship I just made, or, you know, these sorts of things and so and then many of the folks in the project have stepped into leadership roles in our training now to become facilitators of intergenerational engagement within their own communities, and so we also reach more people, I think through we have a research component, so we do a lot of publishing about the intergenerational engagement that we’ve done. We write op eds, we have public facing events. So I really appreciated that, because at the beginning, that was really hard for me to grapple with, and I see now kind of that was the right way to go, to be able to reach more and more people. Often it’s through the people themselves.

Janet Oh  

That makes a lot of sense. I feel like we saw that in the community of practice. And I think the report talks about that, about how you’re building relationships, you’re connecting people, and you’re doing that in a program in a really deep and meaningful way. And so that takes time, and there is a limit to how much of that you can do. Well, in the report, it talks about the popularity of age gap friendships, and I know that you have been thrilled to see so much of that happen organically. In fact, you brought two people with you who we’ll hear from shortly, who have become friends through your program. But what I really appreciated about your reaction to what was in the report as well was this idea that you’ve seen the power of relationships that aren’t defined as friendships. And I was just curious if you could talk to us about the importance of that and the power of that as well.

Karen Morris  

Absolutely, I think, you know, with this friendships, I love when friendships happen and they do, but that’s not necessarily the goal. You know, I think transformative things can. Been through intergenerational engagement and connection with people that never do come to see themselves as friends, but they form relationships and they form senses of community. One thing that we aim to do in our project, in addition to bridging generational divides within LGBTQ communities, is also really trying to bridge racial divides, ethnic racial and ethnic divides, class, class, race, gender, sexuality, spiritual divides. And in doing that, that can get messy. And so one of our big goals is to foster real dialog, like meaningful dialog, between folks who usually wouldn’t have a chance to interact and so engaging with people that are different than us can be uncomfortable, it can be challenging, it can be frustrating, oftentimes at the same time, weirdly, it can feel invigorating. And in those moments is often where we’ve seen personal growth and a sense of real community growing among the individuals that are doing this and a way, a great example of storytelling in the in our project, we have a lot of storytelling. We’ll have folks sit in a big circle, so circle of 33 people facing each other and take turns telling personal stories. And sometimes those stories are hilarious, sometimes they’re heartbreaking, and it’s the act of telling and listening to each other’s stories that for many people, reveals unexpected similarities with each other. At the same time, it can really foster empathy and a sense of like a shared responsibility for addressing the challenges others face, that we maybe not know about and that we start to come to care about. So I think in that way, that, you know, I don’t want to think only friendships, but it’s often, you know, that it’s those, it’s coming to listen to each other and respect each other across difference, can really transform both somebody individually and also our society. I’m hoping so. Something that’s interesting is folks will often come to us after they’ve been in the dialog project and said they learned more about themselves and they came to love themselves more through these experiences.

Janet Oh  

That’s hugely powerful, especially with this area of social isolation and loneliness that is like a big inside job. So it’s like, through these relationships that people are able to reflect. And as you were speaking, it made me think, like it’d be great if we had more words to describe our relationships beyond friendships, like it’s almost like we need a dozen more types of words that describe those types of bonds. But I loved how you put it in terms of care and reflection. But I would love to meet Georgia and Casey who are in your program. So I would love for you to introduce us to them. 

Karen Morris  

I would love to. Georgia and Casey if you want to join us. I’m thrilled to have Casey Wheeler and Georgia Lacy, who are joining us today. Casey and Georgia were part of the last year’s cohort of The Intergenerational Dialog Project. So they participated in bi weekly meetings for nine months, in addition to doing an art exhibition and all sorts of things together. Casey grew up in Northeast Ohio, and is graduating senior at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Georgia is a lifelong resident of Chicago, a mother of three, a grandmother of five, and an active member of the LGBTQ community for over 40 years. Georgia and Casey were paired together in an art making group last year and then showed the work that they made together in a public exhibition. And I have loved seeing the relationship grow last year but continue this year. So welcome to both of you. I’m so glad to see you. And so I have a few questions. The first is for Casey. Casey, in the CoGenerate report, you talked about how Georgia saw leadership qualities in you before you saw them in yourself. And I remember that. Can you talk to us about that and explain the impact it’s had on you?

Casey Wheeler  

Yeah,I feel like, well, I had been kind of a drift in school. I feel like I had been in this place where I didn’t know where, what I wanted to do, really, where I was going. I had my mom’s a teacher, her mom’s teacher, her her mom’s a teacher. It goes back like forever, basically, of all these teaching women, as long as, like, black people could teach in the United States, which is cool. And I feel like, after like, meeting Georgia, especially, there was, like, so many points in the project where I felt like I was like, Oh my gosh, just overwhelmed, kind of like, confused, unsure if things were going right, unsure if everyone was having fun, unsure if, like, things were working. And I feel like Georgia really saved me from that, not only that anxiety, but also, like, implanted the seed in me, of like, not only is this, did this go well and like things are okay? Like, I actually was part of making that environment, like, constructive and positive for people. And so I am now pursuing our education, because I started TAing after that, I applied for a TA job after that day, and got it, and now I’m going to Columbia for our education, so I’m very excited.

Karen Morris 

And Georgia, can you describe your relationship with Casey and how the impact of your time together on you? Casey

Georgia Lacey  

Casey was a breath of fresh air. She had a quiet, gentle style of leadership. Kind of a servant leadership. I’ll show you how to do it. I know a little bit about art, because this is what I’ve studied in school. And she really helped lead us and assemble us in a way, to put all the pieces together, but it was a new found respect for young people that I got from Casey. I got the feeling the world is in good hands. I have grandchildren that are 27 and 24 but they don’t talk to me. Casey talks to me like I’m a regular person, and Casey is not afraid to lead because I’m not her grandmother. And she instantly took charge in a gentle leadership way with all of the elders and the others within the group. And it was so exciting, and it alleviated my anxiety, because I’m not an art person. I’m like, no, no, I don’t want to do art and and she made it okay. She made it okay.

Karen Morris 

I love that the report for both of you, then a question this building of what Georgia was just talking about the report stress the importance of curiosity and creativity. What are your thoughts on these as tools that support connection? Either of you.

Casey Wheeler 

I feel like, I don’t know, like you came in. You say that I came in with this leadership, but I’m like, You came in with this curiosity and like, that was really, really meaningful for me. Like I, I don’t know, I have an excellent grandma on my dad’s side who’s, like, very supportive, very engaged. She, like you said, She treats me, not like I’m a kid. Like, you know, you said you don’t want to be treated like a not like a person, it’s like, I don’t feel treated like a kid with her. I feel treated like an adult. And I feel like it kind of is going like, it’s nice to see that going like another way, if that makes sense, like, I love hearing about, uh, yeah, how like that intergenerational impact it had. And like, the curiosity you brought in, like, was so vital. And it really, like, with that group, especially, it really created like, an like, gave me a seed to work with for getting things going. And like, I feel like it was just awesome. Yeah, you really brought great energy to the curve. You’re great, great student.

Georgia Lacey  

Thank you. And for me, just the leadership. The leadership was so important, and I think about being an elder and being very close to my 70th decade of life that this kind of saved my gay life and who I am. I live in the suburbs, and it’s not a lot out this way. And then the pandemic came, and I didn’t want to go to church. I didn’t want to be touched. Don’t Breathe on me. Don’t look at me. I’ll catch a virus, and this was even before church. For me, it was my first time being in a room with 30 or 40 people living and breathing and talking and laughing, and it just rejuvenated everything for me, and even the stories that we told with the youngers, all in their 20s, here we are in our 60s, 70s and 80s, and a lot of those stories are the same, just in a different decade.

Karen Morris  

I love that. Sorry. I’m like, that was just such a cool part for me. Like, I remember being worried I was going to be so behind, and I was behind in my gay life. I was a baby gay, as they say, like, and I feel like, yeah, something about The Dialog Project. Like, it felt like just this explosion, like, this first. Explosion in my life of queer life. And like, just like, yeah, it was, like a burst of queer life suddenly was around me, and I had, like, this community and everything. I think that was such a vital part of The Project, and really helped me, like, get my footing in Chicago, get my footing as a queer person, and like, understand my identity better, which I just like, am understanding better and better all the time, which I really value.

Karen Morris  

I love hearing the two of you talk. I could forever. And I’m remembering last year, and I think our final reflection, Casey was sitting on the floor, leaning against George’s legs while Georgia bragged and bragged about how wonderful Casey is. So but one thing I one thing I’m hearing, I think, from both of you, and then we’ll pass it over to Janet, is a sense of feeling from this experience, of feeling like you’re not alone, you know, and I think that’s really powerful. So thank you to both of you. I adore you. We’ll pass it over to Janet.

Janet Oh  

you. Thank you so much, and I adore the three of you as well. I already knew that I adored Karen, but George and Casey, now I know that I adore you as well, and I’m going to invite Edie Lerner to join us, but just wanted to highlight the themes that I think Edie you see in your program too, but like curiosity, I loved this kind of flipping of who is the learner and who is the teacher, which I heard from Casey in Georgia. The sense of like, great energy that it sounds like Casey was getting that from Georgia, which is also kind of a flip of like the roles for youngers and for elders. So just loved all of those themes that were coming out from that conversation. But Edie, welcome. Thank you so much for being here. Edie, I’ll do a little brief introduction of you. You are the Director of Chapters at Perfect Pair a national nonprofit with chapters on 20 college campuses that matches students with seniors in the community for one-on-one in person and virtual intergenerational connections. So Edie, you’ve shared that the intergenerational pairs in your program often blossom not only into friendship, but feel like family to one another, and what a great like thing to follow Casey and Georgia. So I’m just curious if you could tell us more about how those powerful relationships develop over time.

Edie Lerner  

Yeah, hi. Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited. So Perfect Pair. We started right in the midst of the pandemic in 2020 and there was such a horrible epidemic of the social isolation, not only for college students, which when we began, we all were, we’re mostly all graduated on the national team now, but also the older adults who are living in senior homes in residential communities. They weren’t allowed to have families come in. They weren’t allowed to really interact with each other. So we began completely virtually. And we thought, you know, these college students would love to have a relationship outside of this bubble that they live in on campus, and these older adults, they don’t have the ability to connect with people outside of their community at the current time, especially with the pandemic. So when we create these connections with the older adults the college students, we do it based off of an application that they both apply to, based on common hobbies and interests or shared languages that they both speak, or they grew up in the same town, so they have a basis to develop this relationship off of. But further than that, we also offer a lot of programming to sort of develop these relationships, because there can be a sort of natural awkwardness when creating these intergenerational connections. Because from the outside, you know, they’re so different, there’s so many years between them, but truly, we’re all humans, and we all have all these beautiful experiences and stories to share with each other. So we offer a lot of support to create these connections, and then they meet every single week for about an hour. And I think truly, that’s one of the keys to developing these beautiful relationships, is the consistency and the reliability that they both have for these parties. One of the quotes is one of my favorite quotes in our annual report is from a match older adult. She said “our pair brings sunshine into our lives with every visit, she’s wonderful. We feel as though she’s one of our granddaughters coming to visit, and we love her.” And I just really think that embodies sort of the goal of our program.

Janet Oh  

Thank you, Edie, I was struck. I read the annual report from Perfect Pair, and because I’m just a nerd like that and curious to know more. And what I found interesting is that at Perfect Pair, you really see that need for connection on both sides, on the college student side, as well as the older adult side, and it’s not one-sided with student volunteers serving lonely seniors. And in fact, what I thought was unusual in your annual report was your impact data, kind of showing the impact on college students and olders. So just curious, because I think often the story we hear, especially during the pandemic, was about lonely elderly people, but the solution was really rooted in also the loneliness of college students. So was wondering if you could just talk a little bit more about that aspect of it.

Edie Lerner  

Yeah of course, I think that’s something that we really advocate for. So in our programming, we have older adult volunteers and we have student volunteers. They’re both, you know, opting in to participate in our program and to create these intergenerational connections, because both parties are looking for a sense of connection within their community, but outside of their their reach, right? So it’s, it’s so beautiful to see these connections blossom and form. And from our annual report, about 97% of our surveyed volunteers actually felt that they learned something new from these connections and an increase of happiness after every time that they saw their pair. And these, these older adult 100% of them surveyed, felt that they gained a companion or a friend in a meeting of their pair. And I think truly, having both of these, both of these partners in their relationship, have so much to learn from each other. These college students, you know, they’re learning and growing, and these older adults have so much wise stories and perspectives to share, and I think that both of them are able to form a beautiful connection and also learn so much from each other. So No, it’s not just, you know, student volunteers going in and helping lonely seniors. It’s this intergenerational connection that’s so powerful and so meaningful to both parties.

Janet Oh  

Thank you, Edie, thanks for sharing more about Perfect Pair. I’d love to introduce and welcome Trish Lopez. Trish is the founder and CEO of Teeniors, an organization in New Mexico that connects tech savvy teens and young adults with older adults who need help with their technology for one on one, personalized coaching. So Trish, you started your program 10 years ago, and you’ve had a lot of success and are now growing in your region. And I wanted to get your take on something that I learned through our community of practice, and that is that often there’s this hunger to identify that magical intergenerational program that will scale quickly and dramatically reduce social isolation and loneliness. But speed and scale might not be the best goals, given how deeply relational this work is, so I’d love to just kind of hear your take on this, as I’ve known, as I know that you felt pressure to scale, and so was curious how you measure the success of your program.

Trish Lopez  

Great questions. Janet, thank you. Hi everyone. Yeah, this is coming up a lot lately because I’m so excited, Teeniors were just featured on the Kelly Clarkson show. I was there in New York last week, so it’s brought in even more phone calls and emails from people across the country. So our goal is to empower all generations that we work with, so the older adults to connect with their loved ones and engage with their community and the world through human connection, while creating paid, meaningful jobs for teens and young adults. So that’s an important point. This is we have many goals, and it just so happens that we really, I mean, my goal was to do that, but it was a personal goal to address the loneliness and isolation that I see in youth and older adults. So the greatest challenge in scaling a program like ours, as you know, and everyone on this call probably knows, is that it’s rooted in genuine human connection this work, it’s rooted in empowerment and community, and it doesn’t replicate the way software or products do it takes time and care and commitment and quality over speed. So that’s why we are choosing a different path. It’s like one that resists the pressure of what I would say is our capitalist system, the sort of grow fast or fail mindset we are really focused on intentional, thoughtful expansion that prioritizes human connection and that models ethical business practices. So we provide this service even when people can afford to pay. We certainly see repeat people. Our golden rule is like that person holds advice. We. Point in direct and of course, friendships are formed. Of course people are like, I want to work with Daniel again. But really, our goal is to grow and replicate our model beyond New Mexico. I’m just figuring out now. How will we do this through consulting, through advertising, and the second part of that goal of growth is really to inspire others to build intergenerational programs and models in their own community, because we’re seeing the huge benefit this has here in New Mexico.

Janet Oh  

And Trish, because I often hear like when we talk about bringing generations together and how there can be mutual benefit, and part of it is questioning our stereotypes. So I’m curious if you can tell us more. I’m kind of going off script a little bit, but I think just Teeniors is such an important example of this. People will often say to me, it’s like olders hold the wisdom, and youth are really tech savvy, and while that is true, there’s so much more than that. So I was just curious if you could talk a little bit about like, how you might see that flipped in the world, or what the benefits are going both ways. So if you could help us, kind of, yeah, those stereotypes.

Trish Lopez  

That’s great thank you so much, Janet for bringing that up. That part of as I said, this is like multi faceted goal of this work for me. And one of those things is eliminating ageist stereotypes. And so part of that is not all older adults are uncomfortable with technology. You know, some of them are very tech savvy, and some of them come through questions that are far more advanced than some of our seniors can even do. And not all younger people are super tech savvy. A lot of them know how to use their own phone, but they may not even use something basic, like their calendar on their phone, and so they’re like, I have no idea how to teach that, you know? So there’s so just in technology alone, there’s a lot of stereotypes, but there’s also the stereotypes of an older person thinking that all younger people want, like they want to be a Kardashian, and younger people thinking, Oh, they’re old. They’re what I think are often also ageist stereotypes. Of course, you know that they won’t get them, that they won’t understand them, that they’re gonna sort of drown them with their experience or their life stories and not have any way to really connect. And so I love seeing those stereotypes kind of fall away and crumble as we continue to do this work. And yeah, that’s, I could go on about that there’s not only much that the younger adults learn from the older adults that they work with, but there’s also, there’s, I mean, there’s so many elements to this. So from a personal connection, they learn a lot. From a professional connection, they learn a lot. And then it’s fun to have, like, there was a woman who wanted to create a dating profile, because we we help with everything. And it can be like lost password, or it can be something much more advanced. There’s across the board, one woman wanted to do an online dating profile, and so the younger teen year, the gentleman was like, let’s talk about some tips so that you know that what could be a scam and what isn’t. You know, we teach classes on that kind of stuff all the time, but it’s just, yeah. Does that answer your question? Janet, I feel like it could go on on this.

Janet Oh  

Yeah, no. Thank you. I feel like what I’m hearing you say is that some of those stereotypes just by relationship building, so just by those, like, two individuals getting to know each other in their full humanity. And I love the example of, like a dating profile, like that sounds so fun. And also helps, I think, to see a person in their full nuance of like all of those different questions that kind of harkening back to Casey and George’s conversation. Sometimes in our familial intergenerational relationships, they’re more limited. And so outside of family, we can be curious. We can explore other ways of interacting and other parts of our life.

Trish Lopez 

Yes, that last point, Janet, would be a lot of kids don’t even know that word ageism. And it’s very indicative of when we are in the privileged position. You know, we could take our skin color, for example. We don’t know how other people experience life. We just assume they experience life the way we do, or we assume whatever other stereotypes. And so when I introduce that topic at which I do, every time I orient a new Teenior, they like, see the examples I give, and they’re like, Wow. And I’m like, it’s really important that you know this, because the luck or the privilege of where we are in life helps us to share that privilege with others. You know, we can recognize it. We can call it out when there’s some woman in the grocery store line who’s like, but I don’t know how to do this self checkout thing, and it’s just sort of standing there, and someone will see it now, if they recognize the sort of unfairness, the ageism of that like, Oh, let me go help that woman. She might be lost. She might not understand how to do this. So thank you for bringing that up. Yes. In many ways.

Janet Oh  

Yeah, thank you. Thanks, Trish and it what, what I’m hearing in, like so many of these conversations, is just this idea, and we found this in our community of practice, is that, like all of the 167 organizations we were learning from, it’s like social isolation and loneliness is one aspect of the work that is being done, but there’s so many other aspects, like ageism, like misunderstanding, like not knowing how to connect across generations to so many different things. So I just think it’s interesting to art, to creativity, like this idea that like it is very much a holistic approach. And I think it goes back to that thing we started with Trish, about like it takes time, and you have to be intentional and thoughtful about it, because it’s not like a single solution to like a single problem, because people are complex, right?

Trish Lopez 

And you know, Janet, how we see it now, like, if you if an older adult is their email account, their password, and they try to recover it, and Gmail says, Okay, we sent this recovery link to your old email or whatever other method of communication, they’re like, I don’t have that anymore. Well, you’re just kind of out of luck, because as businesses scale to that level, it’s not like they have a customer service line anymore. It’s not like they have that element of human connection that we’re talking about. And so that’s, that’s what’s so beautiful about these. Like you guys called it hyper local programs, which, of course, all of us want to see scale everywhere. It’s just that it does. It is not as easy as tech or Uber or what have you.

Janet Oh  

Okay, great. Thank you so much. Trish, okay, so our final guest I’d like to invite up is Serena Worthington. Hi Serena. Serena is a Senior Program Officer at RRF Foundation for Aging, which funds finds and funds efforts that improve the quality of life for older people. So I imagine you’ve been nodding your head into much of this conversation. I wanted to just thank the RF foundation for aging also for generously supporting this body of work, the report and the community of practice. So I have some tough questions for you, Serena, so I hope that’s okay, but the first one is that we know from all of our innovators that the biggest need that they have is for funding to do this work, and so often funding is siloed. There’s funding for older adults, there’s funding for youth, and I was just curious if you’ve seen any trends in funders adopting in a more intergenerational approach.

Serena Worthington  

Thank you. Thanks for having me, and thanks for this amazing hour. I really am inspired by all of this, as I was by the 157 member community of practice that led to this beautiful, beautiful, deep dive. Obviously, siloing is a huge, huge issue to not only from the foundation funding perspective, but I think a big driver of that is government funding that deliberately silos groups into youth, older adult, etc. I feel like I’m part of a growing movement of funders that are really interested in intergenerational solutions like as CoGenerate says to society’s problems, I would shout out, you know, in addition to our support of this project, which we deeply appreciated because it was it allowed us to help move the field at scale, which is something we’re really interested in. But, you know, I would shout out to and I’m gonna, this is an incomplete list, but I just want to shout out to some specific funders who are working in this space, like the Archtown Foundation, Eisner Foundation, obviously, AARP Foundation, locally, The Chicago Community Trust, regionally, Bader Philanthropies are all laser focused, laser, focusing some of their funding in this space. I want to use this opportunity to talk about a specific project that we’re funding with United Neighborhood Houses they work with like we like a traditional neighborhood house, which could be like a community center, way places where people gather deliberately, and we’re funding them for a project that seeks to systematically desilo a community center or something like a neighborhood house, through investigating what the sources of those are doing a lot of co creating of solutions, and then working on a training curriculum that’s going to help transform those settings to be truly intergenerational. They’re working right now in Chicago, Cleveland, New York and Syracuse, so we’re really proud to support them, and I think it’s a really. Great illustration of, like, a project that’s working towards systemic change of a rather intractable problem.

Janet Oh  

And United Neighborhood Houses was in our community practice. So yeah, I’m super excited that you were sharing about their work. And I think, additionally, one of the things we found is, like many of these innovators, the 167 often feel like they do this work alone. I think because this work tends to be so siloed by age, so it was very powerful to come together, to have a community of peers to kind of both commiserate with, learn from and just feel supported by. So, you know, I feel like that was a huge part of this effort as well. So I’d like to ask you a question that came up in our community of practice, and that’s that many of them struggled with appropriate ways to measure the impact of their work, specifically because some of the survey questions, it’s just hard to ask survey questions around social isolation and loneliness. So things like, how often do you feel left out, or how often do you feel lonely can actually turn off the people whom you’re trying to support. So I was curious if you could share any efforts. You know, of that partners researchers with program leaders to make evaluation a little bit easier.

Serena Worthington  

You know, I think how I would answer those one, it would depend on the day. I don’t know if I could, necessarily, in my mind, tie it to a particular intervention. And of course, it’s hard to ask a question that that is framed in a way that feels negative. So, you know, there are there are specific. There is a group that is working on a that has created an asset based three item scale. It’s important that it’s short and easy to do. That’s the Coalition to End Social Isolation and Loneliness. So they’ve created this short, short scale that uses positive wording to elicit responses. I think that’s an important shift. There are, you know, some scales, but it is. This is a new area. It’s a new field like RF is really interested in where measurement could be improved, where evaluation could be improved, but looking to organizations like the Coalition to End Social Isolation and Loneliness, I think are important. And another one that my colleague, Dr Amy Eisenstein mentioned, who’s joining us today, was something I really want to mention, which is the European Union has done a EU wide survey focused on loneliness and isolation, which I think is a really interesting idea, because then you have, like, multi country baseline data. So as these countries approach innovative solutions there, there’ll be a way to measure that change, I think of the Netherlands, which has done a few interesting things, one of which is at this grocery store called Jumbo. They have a slow lane. In the Netherlands, people like to get their groceries really fast, but they have a slow lane where you can chat. And they also have a counter where if you just want to talk about the weather. You can do that, in addition to a lot of other things that are innovating. But I’ll mention those two in particular.

Janet Oh  

Thank you, Serena, and we’ll include like, a recording of this as well as other resources in our follow up email. But it’s so funny that you mentioned that Netherlands program, because I was actually thinking about that yesterday, because I saw a little like on social media, a video of that slow lane, and I was thinking how cool that would be if our like in our public libraries, or, I mean, the grocery store is like a fantastic place to do it, because it’s such a shared place. But if we could have like, an invitation like that, or like the friendship bench, which is something that’s been scaling. If we just had these opportunities where it was a gentle invitation, if you wanted to connect that the person was open to connecting. Because that does take a lot of vulnerability to seek that out and ask for that.

Serena Worthington 

I can imagine the cashier who wants to work that way too is going to maybe be somebody who’s very interested in that kind of dialog and sense of connection

Janet Oh  

Absolutely. Well, Thank you so much, Serena. And now I’d love to invite all of our panelists to come back on video, and anyone who has a question or a comment, even the panelists, if you had questions that popped up as you were hearing from your peers, this is our opportunity to just kind of have some dialog as a community. So anyone in the audience or anyone on the panel. And I’ll also ask my colleague Duncan if there was any questions you saw in the chat that you wanted to highlight.

Duncan Magidson  

Thanks, Janet. You know, I think the first question we got really strikes at something important that we wanted to do with this report and this event. And this is from an anonymous attendee who asks: When are we going to start talking less about what ails and limits older people, they say, people over 65 and a little bit more about what they can still do and contribute? So I’m curious to hear from folks here just about some of that positive framing and thinking about the ways that older people really have a lot to contribute to this work.

Trish Lopez  

Yeah, I would, I would answer that. I see that a lot. I mean, because our age assist society, and someone said in the comments, teens feel it too. They absolutely do. In fact, I pointed out to them how they might feel it, how even five year olds feel it when you fall and skin your knee. Someone at the barbecue was like, get up. You’re fine. You’re fine. I would never do that. If Serena fell and skin her knee. I wouldn’t be like, Serena, come on, walk it out. You’re fine. Let’s go. Stop crying, and we do these. You know, one of my friends who runs an organization for dads, says you take kids as seriously as they take themselves. And I think that’s just true of all humans. We certainly see though, because the ageism has been even more prevalent among older adults. People, as their hair is gray, become more invisible in our society, I think that’s why you tend to hear and we tend to ask questions like they can contribute. Let’s talk about them. What are they seeing? And so what I’ve seen is just a calmness and a down to earth. They’ve lost their ability to BS. And it’s really, really nice for younger people to be around that. And no, it’s nice for me to be around some of my favorite people on this planet, or the older people, I really enjoy talking to them. They don’t care what I look like. The kids feel the same way. They don’t care what they’re wearing. They don’t care if they’re cool. They don’t care if they have friends in their own peer groups in high school. They just get to be themselves around them. So that realness is precious. I’m not even sure you could put a label on.

Janet Oh  

Edie you had come off mute. Did you want to add to that? Sure. I mean, I thought that was

Karen Morris  

Sure. I mean, I thought that was great. I think, um, it’s, it’s, you can acknowledge one thing, many things altogether, which I think is what a lot of these programs are doing, right? I don’t think in terms of the isolation and loneliness. That’s something that is, you know, characterizes a person. It’s more like within societal structures and systemic issues that that certain people become isolated because of our society. And I think what these organizations that I really appreciate and report are doing are acknowledging and taking advantage of bringing together the assets of different vulnerable communities in our larger society that can bring all of this to the table. So I think for us, there’s now an eight person, intergenerational diet team that runs the dialog project, but we really, I’ll tell people from the beginning, our main role in this was to find a safe space for them, feed them, water them, and get out of the way, because they’re the magic, right? And that’s because of all of the strengths these people bring that haven’t had the chance to bring those strenghts into other places.

Janet Oh  

So I see another question. I see that we have lots of questions, so maybe we’ll try to go through these. But I see a question that’s around. It’s from Mary from Village Santa Cruz. And basically the question is about, when you’re bringing youngers and olders together, are there tools that help teach listening and curiosity? And in particular, this question is for their village members, but curious, if any of you have good ways of doing that.

Edie Lerner  

I can touch on that a little bit for our program, we are bringing to essentially strangers together to meet for the first time and to develop and build on this relationship. So some ways that we sort of support. That is, during their first meeting, they get a packet of just a bunch of get to know you questions kind of typical for like, a new person at work, where it’s like, where are you from? What do you like to do? What are your thoughts on? You know, these different activities. And then we support that by offering programming from a lot of different ways, like educational programming, arts programming, more like book club, individualized pair programming, to be able to support diverse interests in our pairs and continue that relationship to build.

Janet Oh  

Thank you. And I know, Karen, you touched upon this, but we found a lot of organizations utilizing art as a way of sparking curiosity, because I think it also level sets. So in art, there’s like, not an expert or someone who doesn’t have any artistic expression, like we’re all bringing our own things. So we talk about that as like a way to accelerate those relationships and a way to connect, and I think also a way to listen and be curious using different parts of our embodied self and our senses. Um, yeah, okay, let’s see. I there’s a question from Dave, who says, I’m a professional development trainer, how do I apply these concepts in the workplace to help advance, to help enhance people’s careers? I’m curious if anyone has a thought on that.

Trish Lopez  

I’m guessing his question means intergenerational connectedness. Do you think?

Janet Oh  

I that’s what I’m wondering. If there’s a way to bring that into the workplace? That’s a great

Trish Lopez 

That’s a great question. We are working in in we go out to the senior centers, we go out to the senior living communities, or people come to our office space or a public library to meet in person, one on one. So we’re not like all in an office every day, all day. What the first thing that comes to mind, though, is that when we do our annual like potluck, you know, teen years is going to celebrate 10 years at the end of this year, we have clients and young people present. Everyone’s present. And one of the things I say is 10 years, the main source we provide is really not tech support, it is human connection. And so we would like to take this moment to everyone stand up and for five minutes, go introduce yourself to someone across the room, someone who is not in your age range. And, you know, just kind of get to know each other for a few minutes. We’ve got some sample questions. I think things like that are helpful for me, for these for special events, but I am curious to how people are making the intergenerational connectedness happen in the workplace, if you’re not already focused on that,

Janet Oh 

I actually want to ask Duncan this question. I think you Duncan has been doing a ton of presentations on cogeneration at work. So just curious what comes to mind for you? 

Duncan Magidson  

Yeah,I didn’t want to jump in because we have so many folks on the call we don’t usually get to hear from. But it’s funny that we were talking about that kind of exercise where you come in with a stranger and get to know them. That’s one of the primary things that we recommend to bridging generational differences in the workforce. We call it a user guide to me, but it’s the same idea, which just like, What are your communications preferences? You know, when do you start working? What’s your flexibility? Like, are you on Slack or email? And of course, that can apply to all kinds of relationships, but we really find, you know, we did this report where we asked about what is stopping people from co generating and one of the biggest issues, or the biggest issue, was just this lack of knowing where to get started. And communications challenges are the biggest part of that, especially younger people feel like they don’t know how to talk to older people. So just establishing those up front is super important. And I’ll also say a lot of corporate environments do this, but what we call reverse or cross mentorship, where you intentionally set up mentoring relationships, where the expectation is that there’s going to be teaching and learning from both sides. So I’ll just give you those two as a way to get started thinking about bringing that into the workplace.

Janet Oh  

And I see that a lot of ideas are also coming through the chat. So this whole audience is is like a wealth of knowledge as well. So we’ll share the chat afterwards. Serena, I’m curious. We had a question about for RRF, how you all think about social and intergenerational connectedness and the programs that you support. So just curious, if you could just speak a little bit more about that.

Serena Worthington  

Sure, I put some of this in the chat, one of or in the Q&A one of them. We do have a document that talks about our philosophy a little bit, but we’re interested our spending strategies are building on existing programs and services, using technology as a tool for connection, promoting, promoting meaningful engagement and creating bonds across generations. So our, you know, our category is social and intergenerational connectedness, so we see that in a holistic way. I hope that answers your question we really are looking at like new assessment tools, broadening or sharpening existing ones, as I was talking about, or backing dissemination or implement. 

Janet Oh  

Thanks, Serena. Okay, another funder question, but not just for Serena. Everyone else too, since we all have to that’s part of our work is to get the funding we need. But Lewis asks, relationship building is key to mental wellness, but to funders that can feel soft or that can seem soft. How do we as a field have when we apply for funding, make funders understand that we are binding America, generation by generation, creating connections, communication skills and community? So I’m curious we talk about this so much like, how do we go from seemingly nice, nice to have warm, fuzzy to necessary? Would love to hear any thoughts about that.

Janet Oh 

Trish

Trish Lopez  

We probably similar to a lot of social profits. I call them social profits, instead of nonprofits. Get our money from different sources, and so if that grant opportunity is we are trying to create employment for youth, which is one of the things we do, and we pay better than like Apple. I will apply for that funding focused around what we do for youth, and then what we do in general, for all generations is kind of the frosting on the cake. And it’s the same where, if there did happen to be grant money that focuses on loneliness, social isolation, social connection, I would love to see that grant, because we could apply for that from the perspective of the whole program. So I think with a lot of social profits, we have to kind of focus on what that particular funding source is offering. And I think it’s just every bit is true. You’re just sort of focusing differently in on on what they want to see happen more in the world.

Janet Oh  

Yeah. So I hear you saying you’re sort of speaking, you’re understanding the language of the funding source and speaking to that, speaking in their language, rather than maybe having like a boiler plate that you use generically.

Trish Lopez  

Absolutely. It’s kind of like with all of us. You know, everyone on this call cares about many social causes. We can’t all devote all of our time to homelessness and saving animals and this and that. So we do what we can in our lives, and I think with funding sources, those organizations are focused on one or two particular areas, usually. So if you’re applying, you kind of say, well, let me uplift this part of my work that is speaking specifically to you and what your organization is interested in.

Janet Oh  

Anyone else want to share? Karen

Karen Morris  

I’ll say it’s been interesting for us that in terms of finding funding, and the path, the winding, interesting path that it is, is a little bit of a no a lot of flexibility in terms of considering funding sources. We near the beginning, thought about becoming a nonprofit, you know, and applying for funding. We were having issues the siloing of the funding in terms of ages and stuff. The four people that now lead the project were also academics, and people had asked us to start doing research. So actually, where we’ve been finding funding, we’ll see if that changes. Now has been through research grants, and so that’s been useful in a couple of ways. Number one, because then we’re able to disseminate work. But also this question about, How do you assess the impact, which, of course, is like so hard. And we have a developmental psychologist on our team, but we also have an anthropologist, me and Stef. And so we’re using different ways, but we’re in some ways, then producing kind of our own reports, not just for ours, but for what kind of outcomes you’re seeing in a larger way. So I think we kind of between different but I think that’s been interesting for us to kind of strategically realize, sometimes similar to how Trish is talking about in terms of where where the funding is, and which parts of what we do fit.

Janet Oh  

Thank you, Karen. Well, we’re coming to the end of our time together, so I just wanted to give a big thank you to all of the panelists, as well as a big thank you to the audience for joining us. Duncan has like a very short poll for everyone, and we’d love to hear your response to this question. As I mentioned, we’ll be sending a follow up email with the recording and a link to the chat, and, of course, a link to the report if you haven’t seen it yet, check it out. We’ve been getting a lot of love for the designers who helped us kind of visually design it. So please take a look when you have a moment, and just a huge thank you to Karen, to Serena, to Edie, to Casey, to Georgia, to Trish and, of course, to Duncan. Thanks so much, everybody.