| How older adult volunteers & young people mutually benefit from shared time together

| Alisa Tang

| Reprinted by permission from Alisa’s Daily Dose

| Many older adults in our region don’t live near their grandchildren. On the flip side, many young people in our region don’t have grandparents living nearby. Meanwhile, loneliness is pervasive, and in the absence of these relationships, something is lost.

This disconnect between people of different generations is what an organization called Empowering the Ages is trying to fix. ETA connects young people and older adult volunteers, executive director and co-founder Leah Bradley told me, with the idea that it’s mutually beneficial for both generations as well as the larger community.

Leah said ETA started in 2019 with a focus on reducing loneliness and isolation for older adults and teenagers. The organization expanded its work to connect volunteers with young kids to help prepare them for kindergarten. An assessment of the 2023-24 school year indicated that more than half of children in Maryland starting elementary school were not ready for the kindergarten curriculum.

“We wanted to help with that challenge to help schools. We also needed to focus on parents and caregivers to teach them how to navigate the [Montgomery County Public School] system and how to advocate for themselves,” Leah said, noting that many of the parents ETA works with did not go to school in this country.

A majority of ETA’s volunteers do not live near their grandchildren, Leah said, while many children in this region don’t have grandparents living nearby or even in the country. ETA helps.

One of my readers, Judy Furash, told me she spent 20 months mentoring a girl to prepare for kindergarten. Judy — a 78-year-old retired children’s librarian who lives in Wheaton, Maryland — had been looking for something to do that would give her a meaningful structure and a routine. She had heard about ETA through friends and neighbors.

She first met this girl, the daughter of Spanish-speaking immigrants, at the library. Then on weekly Zoom meetups, Judy would read to her and play games to familiarize her with the basics of language and math.

Support independent journalism on aging

“When we first started, she was shy. But by the end, she was a real chatterbox,” she said, proud of the girl’s accomplishments and “graduation” last month from the program.

I spoke with the girl’s father, who told me his daughter, now 6 years old, learned a lot from “Miss Judith” and enjoyed the program. The school counselor recommended the program for his daughter, and he felt it really helped her.

“I would recommend any children for the program … it’s really helpful,” he told me. “It was really good experience for [her], and for me, too.”

Judy told me none of her grandchildren live in this region, and it was important for her as a former children’s librarian to connect with kids again.

“I loved the chance to continue sharing stories and those types of learning games … I got to see the growth of this child. We had fun together,” she said.

“Children are just so fresh. That freshness and level of relating to the world in the way they do — I just enjoy it.”

Empowering the Ages will be recruiting new volunteers this fall. Anyone interested can register now by emailing the organization at volunteer@empoweringtheages.org.

Alisa Tang is a journalist who has written for the Washington Post, Reuters and the Associated Press. Alisa’s Daily Dose is focused on comfort, joy and community in the D.C. region.