The submission period for the “Connecting Generations Video Challenge” has ended and the judges have made their selections. Now it is up to you to select the winners. Cast your vote for the best submission by logging on to http://challenge.gov/challenges/142/submissions and selecting the video you think best reflects the Older Americans Month 2011 theme—Older Americans: Connecting the Community. If you don’t already have one, you will need to create a Challenge.gov account before you can cast your vote for the winner.
The public voting period runs from May 20, 2011 through 11:59 p.m. EDT on May 27, 2011. Winners will be announced on May 31, 2011. The winning team will receive public recognition from the Administration on Aging.
For more information on Older Americans Month, please visit OlderAmericansMonth.org.
Join Generations United to learn ways to evaluate your intergenerational programs and activities. This session will feature a presentation by a noted expert in the field, followed by questions and conversation on this subject.
Everyone is encouraged to participate in this webinar, both seasoned and novice professionals working in or interested in shared sites and/or intergenerational programming. Generations United wants to hear from you!
You must register to receive the conference call information. To optimize this virtual learning opportunity, please log-on to your computer and call the 1-800 number on your phone. If you are away from your desk, you will still be able to participate by phone only.
Register Here
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The EPA, Generations United, the Dance Exchange, and the Rachel Carson Council, Inc., announce a poetry, essay, photo and dance contest. Entries must be from a team of two or more persons, a young person and an older person. The creative work should express the "Sense of Wonder" that your team feels for the sea, the night sky, forests, birds, wildlife, and all that is beautiful to your eyes. We want you to share this love of nature with a child and others around you. When we teach our eyes and ears and senses to focus on the wonders of nature, we open ourselves to the wonders around us.
Contestants will work across generations to share through one of these distinct mediums their own interactions with and reflections on the wonders of nature.
Dance video entries are not limited to the moving body. You can use live performers and/ or capture movement and change visible in nature: birds landing, trees shaking in a storm, a river flowing...
Experienced and first time dancers and video makers are encouraged to participate. Contest Flyer Contest Entry Form Criteria for Judging
Every employee comes to the workplace with a different set of life experiences. The veteran worker who has been in the same job for 30 years, the middle-age career changer and the 22-year-old just starting out may seem like they have irreconcilable outlooks, but in reality these contrasting perspectives are just what workplaces need to thrive.
Instead of adhering to the age-old myths that older workers are bad for business, today's corporate leaders must learn to take advantage of their age-diverse workforces. Today's workforce is aging more rapidly than ever before, and employers who act now to leverage the creativity of age experience and diversity will have an immediate competitive advantage over their peers. As the American economy starts to find its way out of the recession, we need innovative and creative workplaces more than ever before. Companies can make this happen, but only by creating conditions that leverage the strengths of the age diverse workforce.
In a way, this is a familiar story: A dedicated teacher exhorts her pupils to reach deep within themselves for intimate details of their personal struggles, knowing that sharing these truths will have a profound impact on their lives.
The difference here is that most of the students are old enough to be their teacher’s mother or father; the average age in Mary Jane Roberts’s writing class is about 80. The jostling among her most devoted students for front-row seats “is always some traffic jam,” she said, often involving walkers and wheelchairs.
For 18 years, Ms. Roberts, 62, has taught a class she calls “Autobiography” on Saturday mornings at Emeritus College, a program for older adults at Santa Monica College, on the beach edge of Los Angeles. She has worked with two distinct generations of students — the first ones came of age during World War II, while her current pupils hail from the far safer world of suburban sprawl.
This is a “performance” class, more about students sharing what they have written and less about writing style. Ms. Roberts believes that what matters to her students is the chance to take stock in a safe setting, among peers. She still recalls a Dachau survivor who never spoke of his experience in class until the day he got up to read an account of the day the camp was liberated.
Intergenerational
Solidarity: Strengthening Economic and Social Ties" (Palgrave
Macmillan)is now availableThe book emerged from a 2007 Expert Group Meeting of the United
Nations' Department of Economic and Social Affairs Division for
Social Policy and Development (in which Generations United
participated).
A snapshot review: "Based on solid arguments and rigorous
analysis, this book is a splendid example of the high value that
solidarity among generations carries for everyone in society, making it
a truly shared society, a society for all." -Wim Kok, former Prime Minister of the Netherlands.
In the Bible in Palms 71:18 there is a verse that says, "When I am old and gray, do not forsake me..." The LGBT community is about to lose their tribal leaders, elders and generational history without even a peep. In addition, our collective soul might be scarred for ignoring the plight and needs of those whose sacrifice made it possible for today's generation. Most will never even know or enjoy the rights that they fought so hard for you to celebrate today. They couldn't adopt children, run for office or serve in the military.
Often they were institutionalized or forced to live lives of lies and fear.
The baby boom generation of LGBT citizens is the one that spans our history from the oppressive 50's, to the transitional 60's, the liberating 70's, the plague ridden 80's and the beginning of hope in the 1990's. A good deal of the male population of those times already passed in the prime of their youth from HIV/AIDS. Some of the most remarkable women LGBT leaders came to power in that time. Epic battles and tragic stories are waiting to be recorded and told to future generations.
The LGBT community must acknowledge that this generation of LGBT baby boomers is getting old in a time with few services to meet their needs as LGBT seniors. Often they are in smaller and smaller living units, scraping by with little food, limited access to healthcare and almost no living facilities to share with other senior LGBT citizens. The few gay men that are still alive after the AIDS onslaught have few or no peers to share their senior years since the disease wiped out so many of their friends. Like it or not, what remains from the pandemic is an epidemic of loneliness among our seniors.
Adding to our shame in treatment of our LGBT seniors is the fact that we are losing our history.
More than 2.4 million people in the U.S. are raising their grandchildren, often with limited means.
The Christmas tree was bare. No gifts were under it. So she vowed she would never have another Christmas like that one in 1990.
Dolores Chapman was raising seven grandchildren and none of them had a gift to open. That Christmas the kids weren't allowed to go out and play with their Bristol Township neighbors.
"I felt bad," she said.
The next day, with $200, Chapman purchased gifts for her grandchildren on sale.
This Christmas, the 63-year-old grandmother is caring for three other grandchildren - a 5-year-old girl, an 8-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl.
It's tough being a grandparent and raising grandchildren on a fixed income, she said. Of her 18 grandchildren, she's raised 10 of them.
The iconic image of the Baby Boom generation is a 1960s-era snapshot of an exuberant, long-haired, rebellious young adult. That portrait wasn't entirely accurate even then, but it's hopelessly out of date now. This famously huge cohort of Americans finds itself in a funk as it approaches old age.
On Jan. 1, 2011, the oldest Baby Boomers will turn 65. Every day for the next 19 years, about 10,000 more will cross that threshold. By 2030, when all Baby Boomers will have turned 65, fully 18% of the nation's population will be at least that age, according to Pew Research Center population projections. Today, just 13% of Americans are ages 65 and older.
Perched on the front stoop of old age, Baby Boomers are more downbeat than other age groups about the trajectory of their own lives and about the direction of the nation as a whole.
Some of this pessimism is related to life cycle -- for most people, middle age is the most demanding and stressful time of life.1 Some of the gloominess, however, appears to be particular to Boomers, who bounded onto the national stage in the 1960s with high hopes for remaking society, but who've spent most of their adulthood trailing other age cohorts in overall life satisfaction.
At the moment, the Baby Boomers are pretty glum. Fully 80% say they are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country today, compared with 60% of those ages 18 to 29 (Millennials), 69% of those ages 30 to 45 (Generation Xers) and 76% of those ages 65 and older (the Silent and Greatest Generations), according to a Pew Research Center survey taken earlier this month.
Boomers are also more downbeat than other adults about the long-term trajectory of their lives -- and their children's. Some 21% say their own standard of living is lower than their parents' was at the age they are now; among all non-Boomer adults, just 14% feel this way, according to a May 2010 Pew Research survey. The same survey found that 34% of Boomers believe their own children will not enjoy as good a standard of living as they themselves have now; by contrast, just 21% of non-Boomers say the same.2
The 79-million-member Baby Boomer generation accounts for 26% of the total U.S. population. By force of numbers alone, they almost certainly will redefine old age in America, just as they've made their mark on teen culture, young adult life and middle age.
But don't tell Boomers that old age starts at age 65. The typical Boomer believes that old age doesn't begin until age 72, according to a 2009 Pew Research survey. About half of all American adults say they feel younger than their actual age, but fully 61% of Boomers say this. In fact, the typical Boomer feels nine years younger than his or her chronological age.3
by Jan Adams (bio)
The horror of the bullying some gay youth experience busted out of the closet for many folks in the past month with the story of Tyler Clementi's suicide. When fellow students covertly broadcast the young man's make-out session with another boy over the internet, the Rutgers student concluded it was better to be dead than gay and jumped off the George Washington Bridge
.
Suicide claims entirely too many gay teenagers, especially young boys. Clementi's death made The New York Times, but these unhappy events happen without much more than local notice much far too often.
In response, Seattle gay advice columnist Dan Savage launched the It Gets Better YouTube project, asking older folks to record messages to young people encouraging them to hold on through the difficult teenage years and to hang on to hope of a safe and free future as open gay people.
“... gay adults aren't allowed to talk to these kids. Schools and churches don't bring us in to talk to teenagers who are being bullied. Many of these kids have homophobic parents who believe that they can prevent their gay children from growing up to be gay - or from ever coming out - by depriving them of information, resources, and positive role models.
“Why are we waiting for permission to talk to these kids? We have the ability to talk directly to them right now. We don't have to wait for permission to let them know that it gets better. We can reach these kids. So here's what you can do...Make a video. Tell them it gets better.”
The response has been huge; the site now includes more than 2000 clips.
Most of the videos, naturally, are from folks not so far in age from gay teenagers; many are from college students who are reveling in new freedoms, in meeting more diverse people, in living away from home.
But I thought it would be interesting to see if I could find a few by people we'd consider elders and near-elders to share. Here are some that I think you'll find interesting and moving.
Fashion designer Tim Gunn talks about his teenage attempt to kill himself and promotes a resource for kids who are thinking about suicide:
"Please don't leave...it's worth it. Stick around."
Deb Adler says, "You don't have to put up with someone else's crap." I can relate to that. This is a little longer than most of these, but adds a different dimension about some ways young people can push back.
Grace Rogers spoke out as a parent supporting gay children:
"Things happen to us all...it's not always easy...talk to us...we're all in this together."
The fellow from Lubbock who made the video above speaks about being abused by a priest as a boy and, later, finally finding a church he could be fully himself in.
Looking through these videos with older speakers, I was surprised by how many were made by religious people who had struggled through being raised to believe that God hated them and much later found peace in a church or belief system that reassured them that they were lovable and could be loved. It was a rejecting faith system that made them so desperate as young people - and often, it was an inclusive, affirming religious community that helped them become more whole.
For example, gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson made one such a video.
It was a nice surprise when working my way through hundreds of these to discover two acquaintances had filmed one that I think can best be described as utterly charming. They explain:
"Harry, a composer, and Wayne, an Episcopal priest, live a cholesterol-lowering life-style in mid-Michigan. Even as some of the body stuff does get a little harder to put up with, it still is getting better."
The Freechild Project believes that at the opposite ends of the age spectrum lay unlikely allies, both facing age discrimination (ageism) and social neglect. Yet, in many communities young people and seniors are working together, attempting to understand themselves, each other, and their communities more.
In 2011, The Eisner Foundation will award the inaugural Eisner Prize and is currently soliciting nominations of individuals or non-profit organizations for this prestigious honor. The Eisner Prize is a cash award of $100,000 and is designed to recognize excellence by an individual or a non-profit organization in uniting multiple generations, especially seniors and youth, to bring about positive and lasting changes in their community.
The Eisner Prize is a national award, open to anyone or any group working in the United States. We are, however, generally a regional funder in our grant-making endeavors, focused on Los Angeles County, so it is our hope that the winner of The Eisner Prize would represent a program or idea that we could replicate in Los Angeles for the benefit of the children and seniors that live in our city. If the winner resides in Los Angeles, we would consider the possibility of helping to fund an expansion of the currently-existing program or idea.
But the cash award of $100,000 comes with no strings attached. It is our attempt to spur innovation in this field and to reward those who have committed already to excellence in uniting multiple generations for the betterment of our country. We believe there is a ton of good work being done out there in this country in uniting multiple generations for the betterment of our communities. Most of this work is being done under the radar of our national media and outside the scope of most philanthropic institutions. The Eisner Prize is an attempt to identify that work, to reward it, and to see long-term if we can replicate it.
Non-profit groups may self-nominate; individual candidates must be nominated by another person or group. Our status as a private foundation forbids us from awarding the prize to for-profit businesses.
To be eligible, applicants must demonstrate the following:
Be a non-profit organization or an individual (no for-profit companies or businesses);
Be located in the United States, and conduct all prize-related activities within the United States;
Be able to articulate their experience with conducting activities that bring together multiple generations in a manner that generates a positive outcome for the participants and the community in which they live;
Be able to demonstrate a track record of excellence and measurable results;
Be able to explain how the results of the applicant’s work could be replicated with positive and lasting impacts in communities across the United States.
The Eisner Foundation will be accepting nominations until January 31, 2011. It will then select twenty semi-finalists for The Eisner Prize and ask them to complete a slightly longer application. From there, the Foundation will select five finalists and award each of those finalists with $5,000 cash. After an in-person interview with The Eisner Foundation staff and board, a winner will be selected in the summer of 2011, presented with $100,000, and honored at a celebration.
by Paula Span
Compared with elderly parents and adult children in five other industrialized nations, Americans are twice as likely to have “disharmonious” relationships, a new multinational study has found. And we’re correspondingly less likely to have “amicable” relationships marked by strong affection and relatively free of conflict.
A growing trend appears to be younger people thinking of products and services to help boomers as they age, according to AgeInPlaceTech.com. Most of these services are web-based, but others focus on more practical aspects of senior living. Continue Reading
Baby Boomer? Looking back over your life, what are the defining images in your life? Are they the same as those included in the Open Education Library?
(AP Online delivered by Newstex) -- Goodnight, John-Boy: Driven partly by job losses, more multigenerational families are choosing to live together as "boomerang kids" flock home and people help care for grandchildren or aging parents.
About 6.6 million U.S. households in 2009 had at least three generations of family members, an increase of 30 percent since 2000, according to census figures. When "multigenerational" is more broadly defined to include at least two adult generations, a record 49 million, or one in six people, live in such households, according to a study being released Thursday by the Pew Research Center.
The rise in multigenerational households is heavily influenced by economics, with many young adults known as "boomerang kids" moving back home with mom and dad because of limited job prospects and a housing crunch.
But extended life spans and increased options in home health and outpatient care over nursing homes have also played a role. So, too, has a recent wave of immigration of Hispanics and Asians, who are more likely to live with extended family.
"With the reality of 78 million baby boomers coming into an aging demographic, we need more housing choices for caregiving," said Elinor Ginzler, AARP's senior vice president for livable communities. "It can be a great opportunity for connectedness across generations, but also an opportunity for conflict if family members don't keep communications lines open."
An AARP analysis of census data shows that Hawaii had the highest share of multigenerational households, followed by California and Mississippi, due partly to a scarcity of affordable housing. North Dakota was least likely to have several generations living together.
EARLY this month, three generations of the Delfino family moved into the 3,400-square-foot stone and stucco home they designed for themselves in Port Jefferson Station.
Mike Delfino Jr., 52, and his wife, Maria, 49, took the master suite on the right side of the first floor. Their sons, ages 16 and 20, have bedrooms upstairs and a large game room that could be a living room if they decided to boomerang back home as adults.
“If they get married,” their father said, “there is room for them to have their wives there and get a start.”
On the left side of the first floor is another master suite, with sitting room and bath, for Mrs. Delfino’s mother, Anne Calaci, 84, who is making the transition to the Delfinos’ new spread from her home in Mineola.
After Mrs. Calaci’s husband died four years ago, the Delfinos wanted her to move into the 2,200-square-foot center-hall colonial they then owned, also in Port Jefferson Station. She balked.
“The other home was so small she thought she was going to be in our way,” said Mr. Delfino, the owner of an insulation company.
In response, the family decided to design a place that would accommodate their multigenerational needs. Continue Reading
Who knew that the mother-in-law room would become so trendy?
A Coldwell Banker survey of its sales staff found multi-generational homes as a burgeoning trend for homebuyers and sellers alike. Response to the poll found, that in the past 12 months:
* 37% of the 2,360 Coldwell Banker agents polled noted increases in homebuyers looking to purchase homes to accommodate more than one generation of their family. * 39% of homebuyers or sellers who are moving into a house with other generations of their family did so with financial considerations as primary reason for the move. * 29% cited care issues as primary reason. * 6% cited a strong family bond.
A series of publications from the MetLife Mature Market Institute
provide a history of the generations born since the early 1900s. There
are almost as many members of Gen Y (born 1977-1994) in the U.S. in
comparison to the largest group, the Baby Boomers. Younger Baby
Boomers, those 45-50, have the highest average income. All groups spend
most of their money on housing and transportation.
The youngest, Gen Y, say they are the healthiest; they are also
projected to live the longest. The fastest growing sub-group is the
over 85 group who number six million, including 99,000 centenarians.
They have also seen the most change as some were born before cars,
central heat, and refrigerators were ubiquitous.
For more information and to download the demographic profiles see “In Focus” at:
http://www.metlife.com/mmi/
Image via Wikipedia
Image via CrunchBase
Image via WikipediaBy: GEMA MARIA DUARTE
Image by thinkpanama via FlickrBy D’Vera Cohn and Paul Taylor, Pew Research Center
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