Engage As You Age Activity Specialist Stacey Palevsky recently wrote about her experience working for us. By day Stacey writes for J, The Jewish Weekly of Northern California. One evening a week she works for us by visiting an 83-year-old elder woman named Selma that lives in an assisted living facility in the Sunset district of San Francisco. Stacey is one of many fabulous people that Engage As You Age has paired up with seniors throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
Stacey writes that she wasn’t randomly paired with Selma but that “We are a great fit for one another.” She adds that “I bring the outside into her apartment, along with news articles that she can no longer read on her own, positive energy and a youthful outlook.” That’s exactly the goal of what we do.
Selma is unable to participate in many of the facility’s group activities that require residents to have good vision. Selma has macular degeneration and has difficulty reading. She’s also very lonely as there aren’t many people in the facility that share her love of politics and history. Selma also isn’t a fan of bingo and arts and crafts which are often the bread and butter of many assisted living facility activity plans.
A recent article in the AARP presents an interesting angle about seniors and baby boomers embracing new technologies that are out there. The focus of the article is on the growing trend of baby boomers (and even their elder parents) “sexting” on their cell phones. “Sexting” is a recently coined term that essentially a play on the term “texting” as it combines “texting” with “sex” and… you get the picture (or should I say text!).
While newscasts and articles regularly talk about the dangers of driving and texting and/or teenagers texting too much, this is one of the first articles we’ve encountered that discusses seniors sending and receiving text messages.
The Jitterbug, a popular cell phone that many seniors use, is able to send and receive text messages. While texting is often referred to being “fast, easy and fun,” it should be noted that senior-friendly cell phones like the Jitterbug, Doro and others don’t have dedicated texting keypads like many Blackberry and other smartphones do.
At Engage As You Age we believe that this article highlights one of our central beliefs, people love to stay engaged with their passions throughout their entire life. Whether a senior is “sexting” or debating about politics, snapping photographs, sharing some laughs over a game of cards or practicing the piano, their lives are richer by pursuing what they love. Life should always be about more than medications and maintenance. It’s being connected to what you love that keeps you vibrant. Contact us today to learn how to use a cell phone, get up and running on a computer or have someone come read to you. We’re able to make technology easy for you and connect you with someone that shares your interests.
On February 11, 2010, the monthly Silicon Valley Positive Aging Forum Series will takes place at Avenidas (located in Palo Alto, California). It will feature Dr. Laura Carstenson, a Stanford University Professor and the Founding Director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. The topic of her lecture is A Long Bright Future.
This lecture is part of a series that is designed to highlight key issues about the “Age Wave.” This is a great event for San Francisco Bay Area residents interested in aging who might reside in Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda and Contra Costa Counties.
This series is recommended (by the hosts) for:
Business Owners, Non-Profit Managers and Corporate Executives
Elected Officials and MUnicipal Staff
Planning, Housing, and Senior Commissioners
Urban and Transportation Planners
Gerontologists and Senior Service Providers
Faculty & Students in the Fields of Aging, Social Sciences, Economics and Medical Services
Interested Members of the Public who might be “reverse parents,” not sure of how to take care of aging parents or senior citizens and baby boomers.
First and foremost, more and more seniors are getting online via personal computers. According to a 2009 Nielsen report, the number of seniors online has increased by 6.2 million since 2004 (from 11.3 to 17.5 million). We hear regularly from seniors in the San Francisco Bay Area that they’d love to learn what computers can do for them. Nielsen’s findings don’t surprise us at all at Engage As You Age. In fact, we expect the number to increase even more in the coming years. A lot of that has to do with baby boomers that are already becoming senior citizens suddenly being categorized as “elders” or “senior citizens.” Still, we’re currently giving computer lessons to a 97-year-old San Francisco Bay Area resident and many other 80-something elders.
Below are some of the other findings that Nielsen had with regards to seniors using computers.
The top ten activities that these seniors perform online are:
Sent a personal email (89%)
Viewed or printed a map online (69%)
Checked weather online (60%)
Paid/viewed bills online (51%)
Viewed/posted photos online (50%)
Read news (49%)
Checked personal health care information (47%)
Planned leisure trip online (39%)
Searched for recipes/meal plan (38%)
Read business/finance news (38%)
The top ten websites that these seniors visit are:
Contact Engage As You Age today if you have an aging parent or partner that would love to learn how to get online and reconnect with old friends and family or watch a YouTube video of their favorite old show or their hometown.
Engage As You Age has decided to create a community calendar that focuses on aging events in the San Francisco Bay Area. If you live in San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Marin, Alameda or Contra Costa County this will be a calendar that will tell you about all of the events going on in your area.
We strongly encourage you to contact us if you are having any events that you’d like us to post.
Have you seen the documentary Young @ Heart? If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area you should watch it tonight on KQED at 9 pm. KQED, San Francisco’s public television station is airing the great documentary as part of its Independent Lens series. Learn more about the Young @ Heart on KQED’s website.
If you’re a fan of The Clash, The Ramones, Coldplay, James Brown, Lee Dorsey and people singing songs that they love (or at the very least love to sing), this film is for you. It is a GREAT example of people engaging as they age. The documentary chronicles a group of seniors (with an average age of 81) preparing for a concert in Northampton, MA. The film chronicles how many of the participants had to overcome health obstacles to participate.
At Engage As You Age we come to the homes of older adults and elders and engage them in what they love. We’re able to help whether you or a loved one love to sing like the seniors in Young @ Heart or want someone to read to you or teach how to get up and running on a computer.
Below is the trailer of the film:
The show is also scheduled to air on:
Tue, Jan 12, 2010 — 9:00 pm
Wed, Jan 13, 2010 — 3:00 am
Sun, Jan 17, 2010 — 12:00 pm
In 2006, Herbert Baum, became the oldest person to receive a PhD. He was 79 and received the PhD in economics from the University of Chicago! He was “ABD” (all but dissertation) for 55 years beforehand!
He had previously left the university in 1951 to take a position in Washington D.C. as a government agricultural economist. After his stint in Washington D.C., Baum moved to California where he served as CEO of Neturipe and chair of the California Strawberry Commission. He retired in 1991 and wrote a book, The Quest for the Perfect Strawberry, an analysis of the strawberry business in the state of California.
Baum wrote University of Chicago economics professor James Heckman a letter after the book was published. In it, he asked if it could serve as his dissertation. After reading copies, 3 Nobel laureates (Heckman, Gary Becker and Milton Friedman) and another professor elected to award Baum his PhD in economics.
Click here for more specifics on Baum and his dissertation.
Below is a picture of the book cover of Baum’s book The Quest for the Perfect Strawberry.
San Francisco Bay Area tv station CBS 5 will air a 30-minute tv special on Engage As You Age on Thursday, January 14th @ 7 pm.
The show will air after the local CBS 5 news in the time slot that Eye on the Bay normally airs. Judge Judy will follow us!
This is a great opportunity to hear and see the first-hand experiences of both the seniors that we work with and the great people on our team that work with them.
The New York Times recently wrote a fabulous article about 94-year-old painter Carmen Herrera. Julian Zugazagoitia, the director of El Museo del Bario in East Harlem, is quoted in the article as saying “To bloom into full glory at 94–whatever Carmen Herrara’s slow rise might say about the difficulties of being a woman artist, an immigrant artist or an artist ahead of her time, it is clearly a story of personal strength.”
Herrera, a minimalist painter has only over the last decade caught the eye of art historians and collectors. She says that “I do it because I have to do it; it’s a compulsion that also gives me pleasure, I never in my life had any idea of money and I thought fame was a very vulgar thing. So I just worked and waited. And at the end of my life, I’m getting a lot of recognition to my amazement and my pleasure, actually.”
While we don’t promise that you’ll sell your paintings for millions of dollars like Herrera, Engage As You Age does promise that you’ll have a lot of fun engaging in painting or other art activities if it is something that you’ve long loved or even possibly something that you’ve recently tried for teh first time. We’ve even found at Engage As You Age that some people in their 70s, 80s, 90s or even over 100 discover that they enjoy painting by trying it for the first time after they retire. You don’t have to be a gifted artist like Herrera to have fun. The key is to be engaged in something. Ideally you’re engaged not only in an activity but with someone while doing the activity. Oftentimes it is having someone there to encourage and inspire you to be engaged with your art that makes such a difference. We’ve found that this is particularly the case with those who have mild- to moderate dementia. That steady encouragement and inspiration by someone that you relate to and like makes such a difference in helping pick up that paint brush.
Herrera didn’t sell her first painting until she was 89 but did paint privately for over six decades. Born in Cuba in 1915, Herrera moved to NYC in 1939 and was one of the earliest abstract painters in Cuba prior to her move to the United States.
The New York Times article on Herrera describes her as working in “relative solitude since the late 1930s, with only the occasional exhibition.” Herrera’s husband, Jesse Lowenthal was a huge supporter of her work and also described by Frank McCourt (the author of Angela’s Ashes) as “an old-world scholar in an elegant three-piece suit.”
Below are some short video documentaries on Herrera:
CBS 5 had us on their listings for 12/15/2009 @ 7 pm but we’re actually scheduled to air on a different date. We’ll post the date and time once we hear it from them.
Check out our new company video if you’re eager to see us in a video:
