YPSILANTI, MI – In the early 1960s, the “little house” in Ypsilanti’s Recreation Park opened as a gathering place for retirees.
It was a “revolutionary” idea in its day, said Monica Prince, today the executive director of the Ypsilanti Senior Center, which 60 years later still hosts weekly euchre and knitting sessions, alongside meals and programs for the city’s older adults.
The center, however, is turning a new page, one that might be just as significant as its founding decades ago — a transition to becoming an “intergenerational hub,” if not in name then in practice.
The concept?
“Basically from ages zero on up to 100, or maybe even more, working together and doing things together,” Prince said. “Aging starts at birth.”
Uniting young and old isn’t a new idea in Ypsilanti. Dating back at least to Prince’s hiring at the center nearly 16 years ago, it was partnering with the Parkridge Community Center’s youth programs.
It has hosted line-dancing classes open to all, sessions that have blossomed into impromptu dance-offs between senior citizens and teenagers, she said. And with an arts background, Prince has tried to bring young people into the center for activities.
“One thing I saw is that the whole atmosphere of the room changed when there was a mix of ages. It was more vibrant. The seniors were a little more interested in creativity, they experimented more because the kids just naturally experimented with things,” she said.
Thanks in part to a national nonprofit that promotes collaboration and relationships across generational lines, the Ypsilanti Senior Center now is looking to build even more of those experiences.
That doesn’t mean becoming a traditional community center, which while open to all might still replicate the aged-based segregation that marks so many parts of society, said Bruce Astrein, a senior fellow with the nonprofit, Generations United.
“It’s intentionally bringing young and old together to both define the ways they work and learn and play and age together,” he said.
There’s lots of overlap between the challenges facing age groups ranging from seniors to teenagers. Astrein first knocked on the Ypsilanti Senior Center’s door looking for partners in grant-funded work meant to tackle social isolation.
That was before the COVID-19 pandemic, a period that pushed some Michigan health leaders to warn of a “mental health tsunami” in young people.
“It very quickly became clear to us that social isolation was really cross-generational,” Astrein said, and the Senior Center worked with Generations United to launch a pilot for programs tackling those shared problems head on.
Those issues include the need for a means of transportation — common between the very young and old — the ability to locate and prepare healthy food and ways find housing that is affordable and appropriate, according to Astrein.
The push for more intergenerational collaboration has only snowballed.
The Senior Center has partnered with Eastern Michigan University’s Digital Connection Corps, which pairs EMU and University of Michigan students with older adults to distribute laptops and help them navigate the technology while building digital literacy.
Its also worked with EMU to offer intergenerational classes teaching Spanish and brought girl scouts into the center, according to Prince.
Last year, the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation awarded the center a grant to continue planning what an intergenerational transformation could look like.
They’re dreaming big, Astrein says, imagining potential collaboration with officials on making the surrounding Recreation Park an “intergenerational commons,” designed as a place for all ages.
Down the road, the center would also like to work at the neighborhood level to map out assets and needs of residents young and old, he said.
Since the initial planning, the Community Foundation has also provided the Ypsilanti Senior Center three years of funding to implement its vision, and it is currently hiring another staff member to help with the rollout, while working to extend hours for after-school activities, according to a presentation Prince and Astrein gave Ypsilanti City Council on Jan. 1.
The center has already begun mapping out a partnership with Growing Hope, a nonprofit urban farm and local food organization in Ypsilanti, to put on a program that would involve knowledge and skill sharing between older members and youth, Prince said.
That could mean teaching the process of growing and preserving food, while giving younger people the chance to walk seniors their own recipes, she said.
The center isn’t immediately about to swap “intergenerational” for “senior” in its title, though it may once day turn to the community to ask how they want think of it, Astrein said.
“I keep emphasizing that bingo isn’t going away,” Prince said, explaining its senior activities, from yoga to gentle fitness classes, will remain.
“As time goes on we are probably going to reestablish what we are, but we always want to be a home for the older generations,” she said.
In the meantime, the efforts will put the Senior Center on the forefront in Michigan in terms of its embrace of an intergenerational focus, with the idea of intergenerational centers relatively new in the United States, according to Astrein.
Ypsilanti may become a leader in the field, with EMU, Generations United and the Senior Center also collaborating to establish an institute on the topic to educate others and design similar initiatives.
“We’re all aging, it’s just how do you do it in a community that’s more thoughtful about that,” Astrein said.
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