Elders offer many assets to our community, including stories of our history and leisure time to contribute to community projects. Several resources are available in West Central Minnesota to enrich the lives of elders and encourage intergenerational interactions, including a Senior Center that provides meals and activities, three assisted living facilities, one senior daycare facility, and one long-term care facility in the city of Morris alone. In addition, our rural community has many advantages over larger cities in that other formal and informal systems, including local churches, families, and neighborhood networks, exist to support people as they age and to encourage dialogue across ages and experiences.

At the same time, research shows that as our population ages and medical technologies improve, more and more elders are living longer lives. This means that many elderly people live with chronic conditions and require care from family members or staff at care facilities. These staff and families report that they are stretched in terms of both resources and time. In rural areas, including ours, many young people and families are leaving for larger, metropolitan areas to seek new jobs or educational opportunities. Their parents and grandparents often choose to stay in their hometowns, leaving many elders without nearby family and fewer opportunities for intergenerational interactions. The percentage of elderly people in our community, at about 16%, is above the national average, yet these elders may have fewer opportunities to connect with younger people. 

In addition, our students come from a variety of backgrounds, and many have had few interactions with elders in their families or communities. Students live, work, and learn in a somewhat insular community with little age diversity. Students benefit from interacting with elders because such interactions help them build valuable skills, such as interacting across abilities and life experiences. In addition, interactions with elders encourage a broader understanding of the history of our community and nation.

The elder partnership initiative seeks to involve elders of all ages, walks of life, and with a wide range of abilities more directly in the community through intergenerational partnerships with elder care facilities and individual elders. We hope to do this by:

• Involving elders and students in reciprocal, educational, and community-building projects that benefit students, elders and the agencies that serve them;
• Involving elders with physical and/or cognitive limitations in planned activities that meet particular needs and objectives determined by their families or care staff;
• Providing elders and students with opportunities they would otherwise not have to interact with people of various ages and cultures;
• Supporting caretakers with significant resources (particularly volunteer time) that they would otherwise not have.