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Six months ago LinkAge and Clifton College joined forces to run an outreach project ‘Clifton in the Community’ that would encourage engagement between younger and older people. The project would involve students from the college running weekly sessions with members of a local lunch club at the Parkway Methodist Church with the aim of building new relationships and learning from each other.
Six months on now having completed the project we are able to see the true success and impacts that an intergenerational project can have on those who are involved. The college students ran the weekly sessions with around 20 members of the local church and each week the sessions would include a variety of different activities such as music, exercise or bingo and even projects. The sessions not only allowed both generations to learn and share skills with each other but those attending also found themselves sharing personal stories allowing each other to get to know one another better.
The older people who attended the sessions over the six months said that they thoroughly enjoyed the time spent with the students and by all accounts the students learnt a lot and enjoyed themselves too, “It was really enjoyable; we learnt a lot from the young people; we hope another group of them will come back in the new academic year.”