Our Vision
Telling stories and reimagining lives. Connecting generations.
We are an intergenerational project which seeks to connect our youngest and oldest generations. We want to address the invisibility and loneliness many elders experience while also building the communication skills of children. All the while fostering community building, empathy, understanding, knowledge transfer and wonder in both generations.
More than 1.1 million New Yorkers are over 65 years old. Many of these seniors live by themselves; they are quasi invisible to newcomers and children born in the city. The social isolation takes a severe toll: Lonely seniors are more likely to develop depression and dementia, and they are at higher risk for being institutionalized.
We hope to mitigate the sense of invisibility and loneliness that many seniors experience by tapping into an incredibly valuable resource the City has to offer: the 1.8 million children living here.
The Grandparents Story Lab initially runs a series of workshops to equip kids with interview and audio storytelling skills. Kids then interview elders, and we produce the interviews into sound rich radio stories and podcasts. Children then reimagine the stories they have been listening to by creating art to illustrate them.
Where do our stories go? In addition to being published on our website and podcast stream, The Grandparents StoryLab works closely with a variety of public and community radio programs to re-broadcast our content and cast the stories further. So far, two of our stories have been broadcast on NPR, a network of stations, which reach 28.5 million weekly listeners.
For a example of stories listen to: Double Dutch Dreamz and Jillian’s Story.
In addition to this, all of our interview series have been broadcast on NYC’s WBAI Radio, which is based in Brooklyn, but part of the national Pacifica Network. All our interviews are also archived with creative commons licence for public use
Out of the stories told by the seniors and the artwork created by the children, we will produce a podcast series and a book. Following the pilot evaluation, we envision creating an app that allows kids to interview and reimagine their own grandparents and older neighbors.
