Creating your program
Creating your intergenerational program
Intergenerational Connection and People
What we learnt
People are at the heart of intergenerational social connection. People make social connections across generations through repeated meetings that allow for safe, accessible and local social activities. Our approach to finding the people who would most benefit from intergenerational social connection was to respond to the specific community context our participants would find themselves in, and to find the community connectors that would help bring our participants to the project.
Community connectors were an important part of making the InterGen Project work. Community connectors are those people who are key to organizing, facilitating and making new connections with people, activities and places in local communities. For the InterGen project, finding community connectors started with council partners and then expanded as more stakeholders became interested and invested in the project. This involved time and effort to meet with different people representing diverse organisations across communities to talk about the possibilities for intergenerational connection. While this took a lot more time than expected, creating strong stakeholder links contributed to the overall success of the project. The stronger the investment from networks of stakeholders within communities, the more likely the program was to be successful and scalable.
There is a lot of work required to understand community context, build relationships and understand locations and activities that are unique to that context.
Here’s how we brought people together:
1
2
Working with one key invested stakeholder, like a council partner, to help introduce and build relationships with others who can help facilitate a program
3
Asking key questions of stakeholders to develop the best approach to finding locations, people and activities that match the unique community context:
An ideation meeting process map
-
Are there key communities that would benefit most from social connection?
-
What is already going on – perhaps run by citizens and other community organisations, that could be complemented or extended?
-
Are there others I could and should be working with?
-
Do I know the change the community needs or wants?
Bringing people into intergenerational programs
Working to keep people safe, happy and included in intergenerational social connection programming requires planning. Consider the following when creating your program:
Recruiting both older and younger people to an intergenerational program requires different kinds of engagement
-
Young people, especially teens are highly scheduled, so there needs to be some flexibility in timing of the program and a strong purpose to engage them. Often partnering with a school or leveraging an existing program was a much easier way to recruit teens.
-
Older people who might be engaged in a social connection program are usually already highly connected in their communities, and so it may be difficult to reach those participants who would actually benefit from intergenerational connection. Liaising with community service providers can often help to find ‘hard to reach’ people.
Cultural sharing and events
CASE STUDY
Shared social and cultural experiences can be an important way to bring diverse intergenerational groups together. For the Manningham council, an intergenerational connection program would be shaped by their diverse community, and particularly the large Chinese community, living in the LGA. Partnering with a Chinese social group and a local highschool, we brought non-English speaking Chinese older participants together with a larger group of predominantly male high school students completing their Vocational Major. As the students were completing a community leadership aspect of their study, creating an opportunity to hear about the older people’s stories about moving from China to Australia gave them a purpose.
Originally the goal of the program was to focus on digital storytelling, but given the need for ongoing translation, we pivoted to more informal sharing food and chatting together around gatherings such as BBQs, morning and afternoon teas. This provided a more opportunities for connection with the mix of activities and less focus on need for language translation.
