The literature is rife with examples from myriad studies around the world about the benefits of intergenerational interaction, despite our cultural tendency away from it.

Professor of Public & Health Administration Priscilla J. Kimboko notes that Becca Levy (Yale University) in her new book Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live, explains that “meaningful intergenerational contact can be a way to improve age beliefs. A starting point is to think about your five closest friends and what age they are. In my case, I realized that most of my friends were within a couple of years of my age. If that’s the case with you, think about ways to get to know people of other ages through a dance class, a book club, or a political group. Seeing older people in action often allows us to dispel negative age beliefs.”

In the summer of 2021, Priscilla and her colleagues Jing Chen from Psychology and Heather Wallace from Public Health worked with representatives of AARP to develop Grand Connections, an intergenerational program to bring together people of different ages around common interests and to let each generation overcome age-related stereotypes. 

Jing piloted the Grand Connections program in Fall 2021 and again in winter semester in her course PSY 366: Perspectives on Aging.  She mapped out a two-pronged project that would see her students reviewing the literature of intergenerational integration and then taking part in co-mentoring activities. About a quarter of her students were each carefully paired with an older adult from the Grand Connections program based on their interests. The remaining students had an older relative or friend as their partners.   

The interactions were structured so that each intergenerational pair would engage in co-mentoring and activities on at least three occasions. Many of the almost 50 students in Jing’s course participated in highly individualized activities with their older adult ranging from taking food and clothes to the homeless to building a shelf to apple picking.

In addition to their conversations, each person taught the other something. The older adults helped the students build skills (such as making family recipes, needlework, fishing, gardening, winter window insulation, weeding, writing essays and poems). The college students tended to teach technological skills (such as streaming movies and online shopping for holiday gifts) or shared what they were learning in their college classes (such as research on exercise, stress, mental illness, etc.) or taught skills they had such as how to play the piano or lacrosse, to use youth lingo, and even to engage in rock climbing.

Their conversations were wide-ranging and often deeper than they had attempted previously. Topics ranged across sexual and gender identity, politics, family stories, life histories, perceptions of age, and ALS. 

The students wrote a series of journal reflections, and the older adults had the opportunity to provide feedback on the project.  They found that they were discovering life lessons ranging from dealing with loss to work ethic and career choices.  Students often found that the project humanized both participants and stretched their perceptions beyond stereotypes. One student talked about the experience as “joyous.”  Others wrote about how it made the course topics easier to understand. The older adults talked about the mutual benefits and strongly urged Jing to continue the project (“never stop doing this!”).

The project outcomes clearly demonstrated that student engagement was high, there was continuity across the multiple interactions, the journal reflections were thoughtful, and the interactions were mutually beneficial.  So beneficial in fact that Jing and her students launched SAGE (Students for Aging and Gerontology Enrichment), a student club to enrich lives of both older adults from our community and students at GVSU. Sydney Spotts, Psychology major and Aging and Adult Life minor, became the first president of SAGE. They have had several meetings joined by members of Grand Connections.  

Priscilla and Jing are now searching for a Grand Connections graduate assistant who will help provide the communication and administrative support that the program will need in order to scale. This support will help them fully develop the program and make it available across campus for high-impact experiential learning as well as for research projects involving older adults.