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RESEARCH

Aging Well in an Intentional Intergenerational Community: Meaningful Relationships and Purposeful Engagement Martha Bauman Power, PhD Brenda Krause Eheart, PhD David Racine, PhD Niranjan S. Karnik, MD, PhD

ABSTRACT. The graying of the world’s population is producing dramatic age trends that are creating both challenges and opportunities. Major transitions in later life too often lead to social isolation, depression, and illness. The older adults at Hope Meadows, an intentional

Martha Bauman Power is affiliated with Illinois State University (E-mail: mpower@ ilstu.edu). Brenda Krause Eheart (E-mail: [email protected]) and David Racine (E-mail: [email protected]) are affiliated with Generations of Hope. Niranjan S. Karnik works with Stanford University Medical Center (E-mail: nkarnik@ stanford.edu). Journal of Intergenerational Relationships, Vol. 5(2) 2007 Available online at http://jir.haworthpress.com © 2007 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1300/J194v05n02_02

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JOURNAL OF INTERGENERATIONAL RELATIONSHIPS

intergenerational community in the United States, seem to be defying a degenerative model of aging. They have found ways to overcome pain, discomfort, and disability. Using an interpretive ethnographic framework, we examined the connections between meaningful intergenerational relationships, purposeful engagement in an intentional community, and aging well. doi:10.1300/J194v05n02_02 [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: Website: © 2007 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]

KEYWORDS. Aging well, intergenerational community

INTRODUCTION The world population is aging at an unprecedented rate. Over the last 50 years the number of persons worldwide, aged 60 or older, has tripled; over the next 50 years it will more than triple to reach nearly two billion in 2050 (United Nations, 2002). This graying of the world’s population is producing dramatic age trends that are creating both challenges and opportunities (Freedman, 1999; Wisensale, 2003). Major transitions in later life too often lead to social isolation, depression, and illness. Psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner and colleagues McClelland, Wethington, Moen, and Ceci (1996) have written that these transitions include “the onset of disability for self or spouse, leaving one’s job, widowhood, and care-giving for older (and younger) kin” (p. 209). Multiple studies from around the world have shown that, “people who are socially disconnected are between two and five times more likely to die from all causes, compared with matched individuals who have close ties with family, friends, and the community” (Putnam, 2000, p. 327). Conversely, research has found that social connectedness and community involvement are two of the most powerful determinants of our well-being; for older adults, the more they stay connected and involved, the better their overall health (Butrica & Schaner, 2005; Goleman, 1995; Mark & Waldman, 2002; Putnam, 2000; Rowe & Kahn, 1998; Vaillant, 2002). In this paper we present the stories of two seniors living at Hope Meadows, an intentional intergenerational community in the United States. These older adults seem to be defying a degenerative model of aging. Despite serious health problems, they found ways to overcome pain, discomfort, and disability, and to remain purposefully engaged

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until the end of life. We explore how living in Hope Meadows improved their health and well-being by examining the connections between meaningful intergenerational relationships, active engagement in an intentional community, and aging well. HOPE MEADOWS In 1994 Generations of Hope, a nonprofit organization, launched Hope Meadows–a planned, geographically contiguous, intergenerational neighborhood for adoptive families and older adults. It was based on the belief that much of what makes a community a good place for older adults also makes it a good place to raise children (Hagerstad, 1998; Hennessy, 2000). The purpose of this neighborhood was to promote permanency, community, and supportive relationships for families adopting foster children while offering purposeful engagement in the daily lives of older adults. This shared purpose is the reason people live there; it is what makes Hope Meadows an intentional community. With a million-dollar grant from the State of Illinois, Generations of Hope managed to secure a 22-acre housing subdivision on the former Chanute Air Force Base in central Illinois. Existing structures were converted into 64 units of various sizes, with 15 allocated to foster and adopted families, 44 to senior citizens, and 5 reserved for administrative and community activities. The neighborhood is unfenced and with its tree-lined streets is virtually indistinguishable from surrounding housing. Today, there are 11 families at Hope Meadows, with 28 adopted children, 13 biological children, and 7 children still in foster care. With a natural turnover of adoptive families who leave Hope Meadows, 75 children have achieved permanency for an overall permanency rate (adoption or return home) of nearly 90%. The families who live at Hope Meadows agree to adopt three or four children from the foster care system. Families receive their housing free, and one of the parents stays home and is paid a salary, along with health insurance. All programs and services are available to all children in the community–adopted, foster, or biological. Seniors are required to provide six hours per week of volunteer time and, in return, pay below-market rent for their housing. By and large they volunteer more time than is required. These older adults provide indispensable support to the parents and their children, who in turn are instrumental in promoting the older residents’ well-being as they age.

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Generations of Hope is overseen by a formal board. The staff of seven, including administrative, social service, and clerical personnel, has the responsibility for assuring that resources are spent properly. This staff must walk a fine line between directiveness and passivity. They have to know when to nudge without undermining residents’ belief in their own ability to manage the daily affairs of the community. On a day-to-day basis, a sense of hierarchy is largely absent, making Hope Meadows like most other neighborhoods. METHODS From its inception, residents have worked together with staff to create Hope Meadows. We (M.B.P and B.K.E) have been chronicling events, gathering stories, and have been a part of the stories from the beginning (e.g., Eheart & Power, 2000, 2001; Karnik, 2001; Power & Eheart, 2000). Over the past 10 years, we have established a sense of connectedness and neighborliness based on working together toward a common purpose, within a special place. As such, we do not have a traditional researcher/researched relationship with the people at Hope Meadows. As researchers, we do not “enter the field” and “observe the other.” Following Richardson (1997), we “walk with” the seniors and others at Hope Meadows. We are not morally neutral observers; rather, all four of us, are personally involved and politically committed to improving the lives of older adults and foster/adopted children (Christians, Ferre, & Fackler, 1993; Denzin, 1997; Lincoln, 1995). Our intent is to serve the community of Hope Meadows, its residents, and “the community of knowledge producers and policymakers” (Lincoln, 1995, p. 280). We used an interpretive ethnographic framework (Denzin, 1997; Denzin & Lincoln, 1994; Richardson, 1997) to examine the health and well-being of the seniors at Hope Meadows. Random self-reports from the seniors detailed feeling better, improved health, and generally more positive outlooks on life. Their comments led us in 1999 to distribute a brief open-ended survey designed to ascertain how prevalent these positive sentiments were (see Karnik, Eheart, & Power, 2000). Surprisingly, 98% reported improvement or no change in their health status. This seemed to go against most expectations and to be in opposition to much of the social gerontological literature that describes a degenerative model of aging (Binstock, 1983; Estes, 1979, 2001; Pampel, 1998; Wilson, 2000).

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Given this finding, we ( M.B.P, B.K.E, and N.S.K) decided to go beyond the initial survey systematically to gather stories on how participation in the community affected the seniors’ health and well-being. We tape-recorded and transcribed our talks. In addition, we gathered information from daily conversations and formal and informal reports, media stories (interviews the seniors did with local and national media including The Rosie O’Donnell Show, Nightline, The New York Times, People Magazine, and National Public Radio), a book on Hope Meadows (Smith, 2001), and a second survey administered in spring 2004. This provided the empirical material from which our initial interpretations were drawn. A draft of this paper was given to appropriate seniors for their comments, questions, and concerns; these were incorporated into the final manuscript. LITERATURE ON WELLNESS AND AGING There is now a fairly substantial corpus of research showing that social relationships matter to human well-being (e.g., Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000; Valliant, 2002). Both mental and physical health are affected by the presence, absence, and quality of ties to other people. Emotional support available from others reduces the negative effects of stress and even in the absence of stress, health is enhanced by the extent to which a person is integrated into the social networks to which he or she belongs (Cohen, 2004). Social interaction appears to help people increase their positive emotions and reduce the intensity and duration of negative emotions, which in turn boosts their ability to fight off disease (Uchino, Cacioppo, & Kiecolt-Glaser, 1996). People report better health when they live in neighborhoods whose residents believe they can count on one another (Browning & Cagney, 2002). This sense of collective efficacy appears to affect physical well-being regardless of many other neighborhood and individual conditions. It is not clear what produces collective efficacy, but one of the more significant factors appears to be residential stability. People who stay in place are more likely to develop the kind of ties and norms of behavior that lead to believing in their collective ability to help one another when needed and to meet common challenges when they arise (Sampson, Morenoff, & Earls, 1999). A different line of research confirms what common sense suggests about the importance of physical proximity in the development of relationships. Propinquity increases the frequency of communication

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between persons, communication increases their knowledge of one another, and when people know one another, trust is more apt to emerge and strengthen (Forsyth, 1998; Cummings, 2002). Further, people who trust one another are better able to form meaningful relationships and engage in shared purposeful activities. In the past decade, several studies have focused on the relationship between social networks, health, and the well-being of adults as they age. The MacArthur study concluded there are three components for successful aging: a low risk of disease and disease-related disability; high mental and physical function; and active engagement with life (Rowe & Kahn , 1998, p. 38)Elaborating on the last component, the authors found that seniors who believe they are “cared for, loved, esteemed, and a member of a network of mutual obligations” experience healthier lives (p. 57). They found that the more frequently older people participated in social relationships, the better their overall health. The Harvard Study of Development (Vaillant, 2002) also looked at the impact of social networks on aging and well-being. In this study three cohorts (Harvard, Inner City, and Treman Women), totaling 824 individuals, were followed for over 50 years. It is the longest prospective study (where events are recorded as they happen) of aging in the world. Vaillant (2002) noted that the most important difference between successful and unsuccessful aging is not the state of our health or our wealth, but the “WOW!” factor where life is enjoyed–where “successful aging” equals “joy” (p. 15, italics in original). Joy in old age is in part facilitated by: “the good people who happen to us at any age . . ., loving a particular person . . ., a good marriage at age 50 . . ., and gain[ing] younger friends as we lose older ones.” Valliant continued, “Objective good physical health was less important to successful aging than subjective good health.” By this he meant, “It is all right to be ill as long as you do not feel sick” (p. 13). Goleman (1995) also recognized the importance of relationships in negating the impact of disease and disability on wellness in old age. He reported a direct relationship between isolation and illness. He wrote, “Studies done over two decades involving more than thirty-seven thousand people show that social isolation–the sense that you have nobody with whom you can share your private feelings or have close contact– doubles the chances of sickness or death” (p. 178). He also noted that the quality of relationships as well as their sheer number is key to maintaining health. Of special importance are the relationships with people one sees “day in and day out” (pp. 178-179).

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The importance of civic engagement and social connectedness has been documented in the work of Robert Putnam (2000) who convincingly linked involvement and connectedness to health and well-being. He wrote, “Social connectedness is one of the most powerful determinants of our well-being. The more integrated we are with our community, the less likely we are to experience colds, heart attacks, strokes, cancer, depression, and premature death of all sorts” (p. 326). For older people, this is true even after accounting for socioeconomic status, demographics, level of medical care use, and years of retirement. Putnam’s bottom line was, “social networks help you stay healthy” (p. 331). “ ‘Call me in the morning,’ ” he wrote, “might actually be better medical advice than ‘Take two aspirin’ as a cure for what ails us” (p. 289). Although all the above studies, stressing the importance of social networks on aging and wellness, bring the evidence together in thoughtful ways and point to avenues for further action, they do not provide many specifics regarding how to best foster the actions necessary to implement their findings. According to Estes (2001, p. 191), the social and environmental factors needed for successful aging are “underexplicated, undertheorized, and underresearched.” Riley suggested that studies that promoted the importance of social factors in making successful aging a possibility failed to develop the fundamental social structures necessary to provide the opportunities for engagement (1998, p. 151, cited in Estes). Through the stories of two older adults at Hope Meadows, Bill Biederman and Esther Buttitta, we extend the discussion of aging and wellness by suggesting social structures needed to enhance community engagement. BILL’S STORY My biggest enjoyment all the way through life was helping somebody else. Bill Beiderman was born in 1937. Following his parents’ divorce when he was three, Bill was raised by his grandparents and by his aunts and uncles, all of whom lived together in a rambling house in the backwoods of rural Tennessee. By the age of 16, Bill was married. He was in the Army for 16 years, served in both Korea and Vietnam, and was wounded several times. Bill had five children. After divorcing his first wife, he moved to Rantoul, Illinois where he met, and later married Fran. Bill worked as a diesel mechanic for over 20 years until age 51,

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when he suffered the first of several heart attacks leading to a life of disability and eventual despondency. Years later Fran learned about Hope Meadows and decided it was what Bill needed to get him reengaged with life. Fran: Bill was down and out. He was taking a lot of medicine and that didn’t help. Bill is not a guy who can get used to sitting around. Before we moved to Hope, he didn’t have enough to keep him busy, and he did a lot of worrying about his health. Since we’ve moved here, he has changed dramatically for the better. (Smith, 2001, p. 145) Bill: I’d mostly been sitting home feeling sorry for myself before we moved to Hope. I couldn’t work for fear of having another heart attack. Fran wanted to get me up and going again. Living here has done that. It’s giving me something to do. I’m helping these kids. There is a general loving and caring for each other here. The seniors take care of the children and vice versa. If a senior gets sick and has to go to the hospital, the foster parents are right there to help them out. (Smith, 2001, pp. 145-146) Bill and Fran were the first seniors to move to Hope Meadows in June of 1994. Upon their arrival at Hope, Bill immediately became involved with volunteer work in the neighborhood, while Fran continued to work outside the home. He spent hours each week fixing bikes, doing yard work, telling other potential seniors about Hope, and most importantly, sharing his time talking with and listening to the children. Soon his home became the gathering place for dozens of neighborhood kids. He relished his newfound role as “Grandpa Bill.” “Most of [the kids] know that we’re not their real grandmother or grandfather, but they get to call you Grandma and Grandpa, and that makes you feel real good, you know” (Kross, 1996). As the community grew, so did his involvement. Reflecting he said, “Those were busy days. I don’t know how we made it sometimes, but we did. A lot of times I went from early in the morning ’til about 6 in the evening.” Bill took great pride in helping Hope achieve its mission and in Hope’s accomplishments. After eight years of active involvement at Hope, Bill’s health worsened as both his heart and liver failed. Cardiac pain caused him regular episodes of angina; he told us: In order to alleviate the pain, a lot of times you’ve got to get up and try to force yourself to do something. In the summertime, when

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you can get out and mix with the kids, then your brain gets on a different wave pattern. It gets on the pattern with the kids, and I think you more or less forget about it. As his condition worsened, however, he began to disengage. He was out in the neighborhood less often, but the neighbors continued to stop by. It was the children he enjoyed seeing the most. Four months before he died he told us, “We care about them all. We love them all. That’s why they all come knocking on the door.” In the weeks before his death, parents, children, other seniors, and Hope staff pulled together to support both Bill and Fran. We would take Bill back and forth to the hospital 20 miles away; we collected medical equipment and furniture needed to enable him to remain at home; and we sat with him when Fran had to run errands. Recognizing that the end was near, one by one we came to say goodbye. Bill gave back until the end, telling each of us, “I love you.” Bill died January 16, 2004, two months before his sixty-seventh birthday. At his funeral two of his Hope grandchildren served as pallbearers, and another read a poem she and her mother had written entitled Grandpa Bill. Following the funeral, kids gathered at the Hope Community Center to write sympathy notes to Grandma Fran. In groups of three, they walked across the street to her house to deliver them. Here we present just two: Dear Grandma Fran, I’m sorry that Grandpa Bill died. He was nice and funny. I enjoyed spending time with him. And we will always remember grandpa bill [sic]. And we will always keep him in our prayers. Carvel, age almost 14 Dear Grandma Fran, I want you to know that if you need anything you can call on me. I am very sorry for his death. If you need a liver or something, I’ll find you one. That’s all I can do. But anyway, if you want to talk about anything, you can call me. If you need help moving anything, call me. Sincerely, Tyler, age 12

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Hope Meadows provided Bill with a purpose for living and with loving friends around him as he died. The care Bill gave and the care he received from neighbors of all ages enabled him to live his last years of life with meaning and joy. Esther Buttitta lived next door to Bill. He remembered, “Esther and I used to sit out front. The kids would get out of school, and here they all would come. I don’t know why, but they always had to have somebody to talk to after school.” Bill and Esther became close friends who shared a common bond–their love for the children and their desire to help others. Here is Esther’s story. ESTHER’S STORY We sit on our driveways and watch the children go by and the children come up and talk to us. It’s really a wonderful life. –Barton, 1999 Esther was born in 1927, the youngest of three children. Her father was a civil engineer for the United States government. His job required moving often from project to project, primarily within the Midwest. Upon graduation from high school, she entered college on a four-year scholarship. Her mother died and after her sophomore year, Esther had to leave college to help care for her father. She married John, when she was 20. Soon followed five children and employment teaching school. John hurt his back and went on partial disability when Esther was in her mid-forties. To help the family financially, they decided Esther could earn more money if she went back to school to earn her Bachelor’s degree. She graduated at age 46 and began teaching in a six-room schoolhouse in a small central Illinois town. She continued to teach even after the birth of two more children. John, Esther, and all their children volunteered often in this small town. Esther said: The Lord put us on this Earth to spread His bounty, and you are supposed to use your talents, not hide them. We felt the more we did for others, the more we would get in return, and that is how John and I lived, and our children did too. (Smith, 2001, p. 174) When Esther was 60 she was looking forward to retirement with John. They considered moving out West and doing volunteer work on a

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reservation with Native American families. Unfortunately John died in an automobile accident. For the next ten years Esther tried to find her niche. She lived in several places, but nothing seemed to work for her. In these difficult years, her health deteriorated. She underwent two hip replacement surgeries, back surgery, and a heart bypass operation. It was while she was recuperating from her heart surgery that she read an article about Hope Meadows. At age 70, and with these health problems, she still believed she had a lot she could contribute to this unique community. And she did–participating in a preschool program, tutoring school-age children, helping with arts and crafts, quilting, and sewing. In a documentary titled, The Age To Be, she said: [W]hen this opportunity [to move to Hope] opened up for me, I thought, I’d like to do it. I wonder if I can do it. Well, the more you’re around the children and the more you’re around your neighbors, they’re all there for you. And if you need something, they are there! And that is a wonderful feeling. And I’m a lot better than I was a year ago, health wise. (Barton, 2/11/99) Nearly a year later she said: You wake up in the morning and you hurt, you know. And you go out and meet someone and you’re busy with the children, and you forget about how badly you felt. It raises your spirits. . . . It keeps you young. . . . I feel important when I’m around the children. She reported she had gotten more active since coming to Hope even though she now had to use a walker to get around. “I make myself get up and go.” About nine months later, Esther experienced severe back pain. She was in a rehabilitation facility for six weeks. Doctors told her, “You can not return to Hope Meadows; you need to be in an assisted living facility.” Esther replied, “You do not know Hope.” Several weeks after returning to her home, she wrote the following letter for the weekly Hope Meadows’ newsletter: To all of you at Hope Meadows, Thank you for everything: For feeding me a hot meal each day.

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For transporting me by car, walker, and wheel chair to the many appointments. For running errands, bringing in the mail and the newspaper. For inspiring me to improve. Your prayers are appreciated. For keeping me posted as to the happenings in our neighborhood. I do miss the personal contact with our kids. For being patient when I experience loss of memory from the medications. You make my world a better place. Thank you again and again. Sincerely, Esther Buttitta Bill was an especially big help to her at this time. He drove her wherever she needed to go, including, one day across the street to the Hope community center. Women in the neighborhood had put together an impromptu luncheon. They called Bill and asked if he could bring Esther as she was still unable to walk that far. She told us: He came and got me and took me across the street and had lunch with all the ladies. [After that] we started a new thing. I said, “I need someone to fix a meal for me.” Everyday Bill would ask, “What do you want to eat?” And I’d tell him, “Well I thought I’d like this.” And he would check my freezer, get the food, fix it for me, and bring it over. Bill fixed her something everyday for several weeks. Four months after she wrote her letter to the community, she was taking food to one of her neighbors who had just returned home from a hospital stay! Esther, age 77, continued to be plagued by health problems. She had arthritis, a thyroid condition, heart failure, was a diabetic and on oxygen. But she did not give up. She explained: “The children won’t let me quit. They come ring the doorbell and say, ‘We’re just checking on you today.’ They’re here so you can’t lie on the couch. You have to sit up and do things.” In a recent survey, she acknowledged the connection between her health and her relationships at Hope Meadows. She wrote, “My health problems are of a progressive nature, but the positive atti-

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tude here helps me accept my limitations. It is that positive attitude that pulls me or pushes me to ‘go on.’ ” As Esther’s health problems made it increasingly difficult for her to get around, she spent less time at the Hope community center doing her volunteer work and more time mentoring children in her home. Much of this mentoring revolved around her interest in dolls. She had an extensive collection of dolls and loved to make doll clothes, so the neighborhood children came to play with her dolls or bring their dolls to be outfitted with new clothes. “Shalyn (age 7) will call me on the phone, and she will ask, ‘Grandma, are you lonesome?’ And I’ll say, ‘Yeah’ and she’ll come in to play with the dolls. I’ve become known as the doll grandma.” Following is another example (out of hundreds) of reports Esther has written on visits by Hope children: The doorbell rang. Ashley came in asking if she could play with the dolls. She played a while by herself. I asked if she had a doll for herself. She said, “No!” I told her the office gave me the very doll she was playing with. I told her that possibly it was a doll for her. I wish I had a camera for that moment, “For me?!!!” I said, “Yes, find her some clothes,” and she did. We wrapped up the clothes. I gave her a small tea set for the doll. I suggested that she put the doll in a sack. “Oh No!” She wanted to carry the doll. And out she went, doll wrapped in her arms. She rode away on her bike. God love her! Esther told us her greatest satisfaction was “working with these children directly week by week, watching them develop physically and mentally.” She recently mused, “Why am I here at Hope Meadows? I must have been chosen to show these children how to love. I love my job!” Her long-term relationship with James clearly illustrates her point. She began tutoring him in 1999 when he was in second grade. I would ask, “What is it you are ready to work on today?” He wouldn’t answer. He would lay on the floor and I would say, “If you are not going to work, I guess I will just go on home.” And he would sit down and start working. James continued to resist being tutored for two more years, but he wanted the contact with Esther. They became special friends. Esther continued to do things for him including mending, attending special events, and perhaps most importantly, always being there to listen. She

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said, “I’d do anything for that boy. That’s my boy.” In return, for the past several years, James, now a teenager, has come daily to check on Esther. She said he “sometimes comes to just bring the paper, sometimes he empties my trash, sometimes he brings me the mail. I am his concern.” When he was asked why he did these things, he replied, “Because I love her.” Esther and the children continued to have daily contact, each giving, each receiving, and always caring. It is this reciprocity of care (Eheart & Power, 2001) that enabled Esther to age in place at Hope Meadows while continuing to live her philosophy of service to others. DISCUSSION In 1902 psychologist Edmund Sanford wrote: The real secret of a happy old age [is] once more in service for others carried on to the end of life–a service which, on the one hand, gives perennial interest to life by making the old man [or woman] a participant in the life of all those about him, and on the other, surrounds him with love in return. (cited in Valliant, 2002, p. 324) Over a century later, Bill and Esther’s stories illustrated this interdependence between relationships, engagement, and aging well. They also revealed that serious health problems do not preclude the possibility of aging well. We have come to believe that meaningful relationships and purposeful engagement within an intentional intergenerational community form a key matrix through which seniors experience improvement in their health and well-being. Hope Meadows, as an intentional intergenerational community, was the social structure necessary for the evolution of these meaningful relationships and purposeful engagement to support aging well. What living at Hope Meadows demonstrated was that one solution to helping seniors move along a positive trajectory as they age involved having them use their unique talents and resources to play a crucial role in addressing a social problems, that is, to help support families adopting children from foster care. Bill Biederman wanted to continue his family’s legacy of neighbor helping neighbor. He once said that where he grew up everybody watched out for everybody else and that coming to live at Hope Meadows was like returning home. Here, he sat in his yard and watched out for the neighborhood children, loved to listen

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to their stories and provide understanding and guidance, cooked for others, and fixed children’s bikes. Esther Buttitta brought decades of experience as a teacher to her young pupils. She helped these children with their learning problems that were exacerbated through a fractured life in foster care. She also loved to sew and share her enjoyment of dolls, using these interests to impart to the children life’s lessons. The opportunity to be engaged with others, involved in the community, and to need others and be needed is what gave Bill and Esther joy each day– multiplying the “WOW” factor in their lives. In the process of helping the community achieve its purpose, Bill and Esther became active and engaged with life. Focusing on the needs of others enabled them to set aside their aches and pains. Not only did purposeful engagement improve their mental health, it also provided them a conduit through which to focus less on their physical limitations and more on using their time and talents interacting with others. Esther’s and Bill’s roles as seniors, and as grandparents, had significance for both them and their community. It was not the specific activities that they engaged in per se that had special significance; it was their whole lives. It was not what they did, but who they were that mattered. Although Hope Meadows was initially designed to address problems with child welfare, it ultimately addressed a series of social problems– foster children, aging seniors, overworked families, and a closed military base. Out of this nexus of problems arose a series of solutions. Traditional approaches to public policy development often posit social problems as being at odds with one another for a limited pool of resources. This dogma teaches that there is a zero-sum game at play wherein helping seniors who are aging comes at the expense of children in need (Eheart & Hopping, 2001). The stories of Bill and Esther suggest it does not have to be this way. The synergy of social problems addressed in the Hope Meadows model provided a powerful lesson–the intergenerational community became the intervention both in the lives of the children and the seniors. Intergenerational Community as Intervention (ICI) represents a new approach to addressing complex social problems (Eheart, Hopping, Power, & Racine, 2005). ICIs are geographically contiguous intergenerational neighborhoods, where some of the residents are facing a specific challenge around which the entire community organizes. The specific social challenge to be addressed is what motivates people to want to live in the ICI, serves as the focal point for organizing their work on behalf of the community, and becomes a fundamental source of identity and cohesion. Its main premise is that over time and under the

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right circumstances ordinary people of all ages and vulnerabilities will become engaged and care for one another in ways, and to a degree, that go beyond the scope of conventional intervention service systems including traditional intergenerational programs. Often program design tries to target professional interventions to provide just the right skills and resources, to just the right clients, just in time. Interventions and outcomes are specified as precisely as possible in order to monitor impact and cost-effectiveness. This paradigm works best when goals are limited and clear (e.g., increase reading proficiency) and when there is an unambiguous role distinction between agency personnel, volunteers, and the clients they serve. The best of these programs bring together people from at least two generations and are usually community-based in some sense. But they still are conventional in that they constitute interventions in community, rather than community as intervention. In an ICI the community is the vehicle for action and not an end in itself. The basic strategy of ICI is to facilitate and support naturally emergent relationships and lifetime commitments across generational lines. Relationships between the residents of the neighborhood are of utmost importance. The premise underlying the ICI approach is that the presence of three (or more) generations it not just a “nice” thing but “necessary” to the appropriate amelioration of many social challenges. An ICI’s effectiveness stems from what the community learns as it evolves. The members of the community teach themselves how to support one another based on each person’s needs and circumstances and what they bring into the community from their previous experiences. They have the time to do this learning because the community is intended to be ongoing. There are no imposed time limits on the relationships that form in the community or on the activities that may be undertaken. Members of an ICI accordingly feel a stronger sense of belonging and commitment to one another, thereby making it easier to coordinate efforts and cooperate in seeking to solve individual and group problems. In conclusion, with the graying of the world’s population, it is imperative that understandings emerge of how to help people age well. Here we have demonstrated that meaningful relationships and purposeful engagement in an intentional intergenerational community are fundamental social structures for aging well. Ultimately, developing and using these elements within our communities should be a goal of public policy. In creating an intergenerational community around a social problem, everyone benefits as the community becomes the intervention. Not only do older adults find a “means to love, to work, to learn something

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[they] did not know yesterday, and to enjoy the remaining precious moments with loved ones” (Vaillant, 2002, p. 16), they become essential in helping to solve what seem to be intractable social problems. Like Bill and Esther, they continue to give and receive, to care and be cared for, to find purpose, meaning, and joy in their lives–they age well in an intergenerational community.

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Wilson, G. (2000). Understanding old age: Critical and global perspectives. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publication, Inc. Wisensale, S. K. (2003). Global aging and intergenerational equity. Journal of Intergenerational Relationships, 1(1), 29-47.

Submitted: 08/31/05 Revised: 10/18/05 Accepted: 12/27/05 doi:10.1300/J194v05n02_02