Community Issue: Enabling the Aging

Today I'm featuring a program from the culturally rich city of New Orleans that I found while surfing the blogosphere. "Voices Not Forgotten"is a program of the Ashé Cultural Arts Center, which is a neighborhood-focused nonprofit that combines local creative forces to contribute to the revitalization of their community.

"Voices Not Forgotten" is put on by seniors at the Central City Senior Center who regularly do performances around the city that include singing, dancing, and sharing of personal stories.

The reason I draw upon them is that "Voices Not Forgotten" focuses on a marginalized population that almost all of us have a close connection to: the elderly.

Aging parents and grandparents have traditionally been cared for by family members. But as society changes, so do the trends for who cares for the elderly. Now eldercare is often provided by nursing home facilities or in-home caregivers. The 65+ demographic is growing fast in the United States, so this means more and more people cared for in sometimes impersonal settings or environments that may be less personally enriching than that of a home. In addition, the aged sometimes feel that they have moved past their time to think creatively or produce something for the world. This feeling does not have to be the case, as is demonstrated by "Voices Not Forgotten" and the following local nonprofit.

The Center for Creative Aging (CCA) in Greensboro provides arts-based programs for the elderly. These programs have a number of benefits that I could list off, but I think that the CCA puts it best:

Enabling older North Carolinians to create works that honor their life history and creative vision is a powerful step in validating their very existence. Creative self-expression stimulates thought, provides purpose, and offers a process of healing otherwise unknown.

Here is an example of one of their programs also taken from their website:

TimeSlips - a group storytelling process led by one or more trained facilitators. The program marks a fundamental shift away from focusing on memory and reminiscence, toward encouraging people with memory loss to exercise their imaginations and creativity. Developed by Anne Basting (PhD) in 1998, the TimeSlips Project has generated hundreds of stories that are used to produce plays and art exhibits, and to rekindle the hope for human connection among people living with Alzheimer's and related dementia.

Let us know via comment if you have heard of any other similar local programs. Often churches and other social organizations will have similar programming that isn't necessarily posted on the web.