A+

Youth and elders are natural allies.

Youth learn important lessons in patience, persistence and perspective from their elders who can assist them along the path towards emotional maturity. Seniors can discover new meaning in relationships with younger people. They find children’s energy and curiosity and idealism infectious and energizing. Elders enjoy passing along their own experience to new generations.

ELDERGIVERS has, for the past five years, offered young and old in San Francisco a chance to explore what they have in common through the A+ Program. A+ is simply a friendship program – an opportunity to find out how to make a friend, how to be a friend, how to maintain a friendship. A+ normally links public and private schools with senior residential sites and then pairs a youth and an elder and helps them build an intergenerational relationship. There are some variations on this theme, too.

We have in the past, for instance, made connections between fifth-graders at a KIPP charter school (San Francisco Bay Academy in the Western Addition) and Jewish seniors at Rhoda Goldman Plaza. Second-graders from French-American International School have been matched with a variety of senior living facilities. And more recently, A+ put together students from Newcomer High School with seniors from the Senior Center at Calvary Presbyterian Church. The latter had some mentoring activity because Newcomer is an English-immersion program for immigrant children from all over the world. Language instruction was a natural part of that friendship program.

The A+ Program changes from year to year depending on school schedules, teachers, the availability of elders to participate and transportation to get kids and elders together. Getting kids who don’t drive and seniors with mobility issues together can be a challenge!

This year we are concentrating on building friendships between junior and senior high school students who are part of a youth group at Calvary Presbyterian Church with seniors who live alone in the Pacific Heights neighborhood and who are eager for companionship.

Intergenerational friendships in the A+ Program are benefited by a general curriculum which is divided into three parts.

Strong friendships are possible when each of the partners brings to the relationship a degree of clarity and confidence about who they are. So, various exercises in this initial segment of the curriculum help the youngster disclose who he/she is to their elder partner, and vice versa. One of the more popular of these partner-exercises involves cutting out from magazines images that reflect the individual's likes and dislikes and pasting those images to a storyboard. At the end of the session the youngster/elder uses his/her storyboard to verbally explain to his or her partner what these images mean - how they help to describe who he or she is. This self-disclosure is a vital first step. And it's loads of fun.

Strong friendships are developed when each of the partners is as concerned about the well being of the other as they are about their own. Whereas the emphasis in the first part of the curriculum is on each one telling the other who they are, the focus in the second part is on each of the partners actively and attentively exploring who the other is - mainly through questions. Young and old ask "skinny questions" of each other (What is your full name; where are you originally from; do you have siblings, if so how many and what are their names; etc.?) in order to construct an information base about their partners. They ask "fat questions", too (Why do you like math and dislike social studies; did you have any trouble with your children when they were my age; what do you do during the day; etc.?). Toward the end of this second segment, each elder is asked to introduce her/his new young friend to a third party, and vice versa, to "test" the effectiveness of this on-going process.

"Building Community Through Friendships"

At this stage in the project, with friendships pretty secure, attention is intentionally shifted from the friendship toward the community. Based on the premise that a whole and healthy community is actually a mosaic of good friendships — of people who know and respect one another and who are looking out for each other's welfare — the partners are asked to think of ways in which their friendship can benefit the larger community. During this phase, each of the partners reads the local newspaper (subject, of course, to parental guidance) and chooses a "problem" or "challenge" that particularly interests them. The partners discuss the problem and then present it to all of the other partners at that A+ site. The group then votes to determine which one problem they'll all tackle together. For the remainder of the academic year partners explore ways of resolving this community problem through the strength of their own friendships.

The primary role of a public or private school is to prepare students academically. The focus is on intellectual development and preparation for higher education. There is little room for structured emotional development.

One of the benefits of the A+ Program, recognized by parents and teachers alike, is the opportunity it affords children to take time out to promote their emotional intelligence, too, to learn how to relate to others — especially others who are, at least superficially, unlike themselves. For elders, A+ provides a rare, direct exposure to what youngsters are contending with these days, a chance to share with them the wisdom they have gained through their own experiences and to help them develop their capacity for solving life's problems. Many elders are able to engage their grandchildren and great grandchildren only infrequently. For them, an opportunity to be with and to positively influence children infuses their lives with fresh meaning.

"Great program! Spencer loved visiting with Elizabeth and getting letters from her in between their visits, which provoked many questions. He asked, for instance, 'How do we get old?" and "Why do we get old?"

"He was much more conscious of older people's feelings as the program went on."

"I hope this program continues. I know Ava will, because of this experience, always be more kind, more thoughtful, more aware of seniors when she encounters them in her life. I think the benefits reach beyond our kids to our families and how we view the elderly."

"I spend a lot of time with seniors. It was refreshing to interact with children for a change!"

"I have grandchildren this age, but they live on the East Coast and I really miss them. William became like an adopted grandchild to me. He made my life so much more interesting. I looked forward to every visit."

"Evan's parents said he talked about me all the time at dinner. Before our friendship, they could hardly get him to talk. His parents were so curious about this that they invited me over for dinner. We had a wonderful time."

"The kids are so curious — once they get to know you. I found Cienna's questions very intriguing. Being with her helped me to better understand where kids are today, and it's very positive. Not like what I read in the newspaper."