Creating your program
Creating your intergenerational program
Intergenerational Activities
What we learnt
What works as an intergenerational social activity is often more than just simply meeting in public spaces. Our social structures often create barriers for younger and older people to socialize together, and both older and younger people face stereotyping and discriminatory attitudes that marginalize them within communities. These barriers often translate into difficulties creating engaging spaces and activities that both age groups felt safe and comfortable to interact with socially.
While there are many community activities that cater for older and younger people individually, the InterGen project was interested in the activities that would foster intergenerational social connection. We used co-ideation principles to work with communities to design activities that reflected individual community contexts, alongside a socialisation process from joining and getting comfortable in the group, to investment in the activities, and finally to feeling belonging and established connection between age groups (Farmer et al., 2020). We worked with both community stakeholders and with participants to develop and then refine the program’s social activities over time. Planning and flexibility were keys to success; enough time to discuss and co-ideate potential activity ideas that responded to community context, and enough flexibility to refine over time and in response to the unique participant group needs.
Our approach to developing intergenerational activities was:
Understand and identify the purpose and the context for activities
Introduce your activity to participants
Modify according to feedback
Deliver flexibly
We also identified some key indicators of success of intergenerational activities:
Activities needed to bring together diverse groups through a common purpose; to play games, tell stories, to learn something, or to chat and share coffee.
Though these activities differ, their articulation as an aim of the program gives the participants a common or shared purpose.
Activities need to be reciprocal and mutually beneficial.
Activities that benefit only one age group tended not to be sustainable over time. For example, young people teaching older people digital skills, or older people mentoring young people about careers were not sustainable social activities.
Expertise and authority needed to be balanced between age groups.
Unequal power relations in social activities often fostered more discriminatory attitudes or disengagement. Planning is needed to ensure equity between participants and ensure that each age group has an opportunity to contribute knowledge or expertise. For example, board game activities were swapped so that each age group had an opportunity to teach the other a new game.
Expect to modify activities according to the size of the group, their abilities and interests and to build on emerging interests and connections.
Refinement or change in activities does not mean failure of the overall group. Flexibility can also help to foster participants’ creativity around what they would like to contribute to the group.
Social connection must be facilitated through the activity.
This means that the activity should be considered appealing by both age groups to create shared purpose and motivation to engage.
Managing expectations of an ‘outcome’ to the activity is key to success.
Social connection programs are often confusing to participants who are looking to be mentors, or for leadership opportunities or community purpose. Being clear that the purpose of the activity is to make friends, and engage in a pleasurable social activity or hobby can help diffuse disappointment where participants were emphasizing an outcome or product emerging from the program.
Activities should not demand a certain kind of participation.
Participants should be free to choose how they would like to participate, and whether they would like to participate at all in order to foster trust and acceptance across age and ability.
Activities need to take into account the physical, cognitive and sensory issues that might otherwise hinder participation in an activity.
All activities should have secondary spaces for those who need to ‘take a break’ from activities.
Board games, cards and puzzles
Benefits
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Most age groups will have a game that they enjoy or want to learn;
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Easily scaled up or down depending on group size;
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Don’t need equal numbers of older and younger participants;
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Not weather dependent;
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Conducive to school participation.
Considerations
Some people may have sensory or cognitive issues that may hamper participation or enjoyment of some games activities.
Choose your activities - things to consider
Download the Workshop schedule template here
CASE STUDY
Whitehorse council
Whitehorse council was keen to create partnerships to foster new intergenerational activities. Partnering with a local highschool, the aim of the activities was to showcase Whitehorse’s new community precinct, The Orchard Precinct and Community Arts centre. We used the restored homestead kitchen, the community garden and the classroom sized shed to offer a range of social activities each week that older and younger participants could engage with. This included baking, craft, puzzles, card games, gardening and outdoor walking, games or chat. We noticed that eventually younger and older participants would either gather in the same pairs or small groups to complete the same activity every week. Some participants had sensory issues and always chose to sit with a group but work on an individual activity. Other participants preferred to join a new group or activity every week, but the majority made lasting friendships through their eventual preferred activity and have continued their social activities in the following term.
