The Power of Community: Increasing Connection Among Older Adults
- Connection is vital: Staying socially active is essential for our mental and physical well-being as we navigate life's later stages.
- We’ve teamed up with Hank by Wider Circle, a free platform for adults 55+ that promotes engagement through online and other activities. Age Well programs and our free Adventures Online lectures are among the live resources available to Hank by Wider Circle members.
- Hank by Wider Circle also offers a robust calendar of in-person activities in a growing number of metro areas. Their vision long-term is that the Hank community itself will help curate and shape how engagement looks in the future.
We’re social creatures by nature, and being connected to others is important to our well-being at any age. But as we get older, our interpersonal networks may shrink. We retire and lose touch with colleagues. Friends move away. Family relocate for careers or other reasons. We may feel less comfortable driving. The cumulative result is that we connect less.
Medical professionals agree, that’s not a good thing — mentally, emotionally and even physically. (Social isolation has been documented to increase the risk of depression, heart disease and dementia, among other ailments.)
Fortunately, as awareness of the problem has increased, so have solutions for staying engaged as we grow older.
To take the most immediate example, ongoing engagement and lifelong learning are at the heart of Road Scholar’s work, where we strive to help people find community and connection through our educational travel programs. Friendships are formed on these programs, and just as important, fresh perspectives about the world and its cultures impart a sense of belonging on a much larger scale.
Many of those same people who travel with us eagerly participate on our social platforms — more than half a million of them by recent count. On Facebook alone, Road Scholars have not just a general-interest group, but groups for women, outdoors enthusiasts, retired teachers, caregivers, social justice advocates and more — all of them helping build community.
The addition, Road Scholar’s At Home online adventures programs have taken our outreach yet another step forward in recent years. Learning online with us allows people who can no longer travel — or choose not to — the opportunity to explore the world from the comfort of home, and to engage virtually with our subject-matter experts and fellow participants.
Demand for those online adventures continues to be strong, and that success inspired us to consider how we could reach out to people in other ways. That, in turn, gave rise to Age Well — our series of free online lectures addressing topics far beyond Road Scholar’s traditional, travel-focused programming. The lectures explore myriad issues including health, nutrition, financial planning, lifestyle modifications, changing family dynamics — factors that help determine the extent to which people flourish in the fourth age of life. The reception Age Well received has exceeded even our greatest expectations.
With Age Well serving as yet another “proof of concept” that people value and desire connection, we’ve found another way to fulfill that need not just with our participants, but with a broader audience.
We’ve recently partnered with Hank by Wider Circle, an organization that embraces an even more ambitious goal with respect to creating community for older people. Hank by Wider Circle is an online platform for those 55+ that offers content on a wide range of topics, some of it developed by Hank by Wider Circle and some by outside partners like Road Scholar, AARP and many others on both a national and local level.
There’s no cost to enroll, and practically everything offered on the platform is free. Age Well lectures and Road Scholar’s free Adventures Online lectures are available there. So are programs on hobbies, health and fitness, for instance. There are workshops for writers and artists, and others to help older learners master various forms of popular technology.
They’re all live, and participants can join in chats during the activity to share thoughts, ask questions and connect with other participants.
As interesting as all that is, Hank by Wider Circle gets even more exciting when it moves beyond the virtual space. In select locations right now, but more broadly in the future, in-person events are a growing aspect of the platform. In the Los Angeles and New York City areas, as well as South Florida, people on Hank can join in all sorts of in-person activities, some organized by Hank by Wider Circle itself, others by local partners, and still others by Hank by Wider Circle’s own users, who are empowered and encouraged to help build community in this way. A recent search for in-person events in the Los Angeles area turned up these, among many others offered within a single week:
- Line-dancing lessons
- A film screening
- A mocktail mixology lesson
- Birdwatching
- Watercolor classes
- Trips to local festivals
- A morning hike and picnic
- A book club
- Tai Chi in a park
- A beach cleanup
- Gardening tips
Those who sign up can discuss plans for before, during and after events, invite one another to related (or unrelated) events, and be empowered and inspired to create additional events themselves.
Louisa Neumann, Director of Partnerships and Markets for Hank’s parent organization, Wider Circle, said that while partnering nationally with organizations like Road Scholar for online content is a high-level process, finding and highlighting local in-person events is a very grassroots one. “We nurture those communities by going out, finding local partnerships with senior centers, community centers, libraries, museums — essentially any sort of community-minded organization that is offering free or low-cost activities that we think our members would be engaged in, or would be interested in participating in.”
She continued, “But over time, we envision less of a need to curate these events as members themselves increasingly define what their community will look like.”
That’s where the genius of Hank by Wider Circle’s approach really comes into focus. Krystee Knapic, Chief Delivery Officer for Wider Circle, says: “Not only can people find great events delivered by partners like Road Scholar, they can also host their own events, so they can feel like they're meaningful participants in building a community.”
The vision is to make Hank by Wider Circle a largely self-driven community, and the organization is already seeing how that will come to pass.
Louisa Neumann notes: “It seems like in each market there are a handful of members who I would consider power users, and they just really get it. We have a woman in Los Angeles who posts events a couple times a week — you know, she wants to go see an exhibit at the museum, and so she's posting that, and four or five people are going with her there. She does a weekly ‘lunch bunch’ sort of thing, meeting up at a restaurant. Some people come again and again, and others think, ‘This looks cool, I want to meet new people, that's why I'm here, I'll join in, too.’”
Krystee Knapic adds: “There were two ladies that I met at one of the first events I did, and they ended up connecting with each other. I actually thought they’d known each other for a long time, but they said, no, we just met, and now we're best friends, and every day we get on the platform, and we message each other different things to do, and now we have this full social calendar.”
Hank by Wider Circle members aren’t shy about sharing their feelings about the platform. On their website, gethank.com, the organization posts comments like these:
“Now that I’m retired, I finally have time to do things and I love it! Hank makes it easy to find cool events in the community. Every week there’s something fun to look forward to!”
“I went to bed happy, knowing that I have a Hank event the next day. I live alone and it’s important to do things with other people.”
Says Knapic: “We hear stories like that all the time, not just about the impact of in-person events, but of our virtual ones, too. People tell us, ‘You know, I had nothing to do all afternoon because I'm unable to leave my home, and now I have this group of people I talk to every Wednesday afternoon, and I feel like I found my group, my community.’ Those are the stories that keep us moving and coming back to why we do what we do.”
It's why we here at Road Scholar do what we do, too. We continue to discover, through our own work and through partnerships with organizations like Hank, that there’s no lack of desire for people to stay engaged and connected as they grow older, there’s often just a lack of opportunity. That’s a problem for which we’re honored to help provide solutions.
You can find upcoming programs from our newest initiative, Age Well, on our website. And you can find them at gethank.com, too!
