Grandma Magic Episode 14: Nancy Henkin, Championing Intergenerational Connection
Since the 1970s, Nancy Henkin has tirelessly advocated for intergenerational connections, recognizing them as a crucial lens through which numerous challenges in our lives can be effectively addressed. She established and led the Intergenerational Center at Temple University for over 30 years, actively supporting the development and implementation of intergenerational programs globally. Recognized for her significant contributions, she was elected as an Ashoka Fellow for her efforts in bringing different generations together. Currently serving as a Senior Fellow at Generations United, she is dedicated to tackling the loneliness epidemic. Join us in this episode to delve into her journey and gain a deeper understanding of the importance of connecting, serving, and working together across all ages.
To learn more about the work of Generations United visit https://www.gu.org/
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Welcome to Grandma Magic, a podcast from the Grandmother Collective. We are a nonprofit organization that supports and advocates for a world where a grandmother’s power is seen, cultivated, and activated for positive change. The Grandma Magic podcast is an opportunity to learn more about the unique positions that grandmothers, aunties, and other older women around the world can play in advancing positive social development by talking to and learning from grandmother changemakers.
We hope this series inspires you, brings you joy, and helps you recognize the enduring magic and wisdom that comes from grandmothers everywhere. My name is Lynsey Farrell and I’m your host. Today we have Dr. Nancy Henkin, founder and former executive director of the Intergenerational Center at Temple University. She’s currently a senior fellow at Generations United.
Her work has focused on intergenerational community building and programming, intergenerational shared sites, intergenerational relationships in immigrant communities, lifelong civic engagement, and kinship care. Dr. Henkin serves on the editorial board of the International Journal on Intergenerational Relations, and she is the recipient of numerous awards including the Jack Ossofsky Award from the National Council on Aging and the Maggie Kuhn Award from the Gray Panthers.
In 2006, she was elected into the Ashoka Fellowship, a global community of social entrepreneurs. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.
Nancy Henkin: Thanks Lynsey. Appreciate it.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): A question that I often start with, because I really want to understand people’s influences and the older women that have had an influence on their life. So I’ll say do you have a grandmother figure? But I know that you have had a really good relationship with the founder of the Gray Panthers, and so I wonder if you can share a little bit about that and even, I don’t know if everybody even knows what the Gray Panthers is, and, you know, share about your relationship with her.
Nancy Henkin: I’d love to. I was really fortunate. When I was 32, I finished my doctorate and I went to Temple and I started this center and I was lucky enough to meet this incredible woman named Maggie Kuhn. As you said, she was the national convener of the Gray Panthers. The Gray Panthers was an activist organization looking at the power of older people to improve communities and improve the quality of life for all ages.
Maggie was this little frail person. I’m not frail, but I’m a little person too. But she actually wasn’t as tall as I was. She had the most amazing spirit and energy and just wisdom. And she became my mentor. She was in Philadelphia. I was 32. She was 75, which is the age I am now. I just realized that today. And that kind of struck me. Oh my God. This is who she was when I met her.
And I said that I was really interested in doing intergenerational work and I was going to have an elder hostel, you know, that is where older people come on campus. And Maggie said to me, well, you know, they’re okay, but often the young people and older people don’t really interact. The older people just go on campus and they study and they really don’t meet young people.
I thought about it and I said, well, would you mind if I came over to your house, she lived in Germantown, and we could talk about a little bit. And that started about 15 years of interacting with Maggie. I used to go over there and she’d say, “Nancy, come sit on the sofa next to me. Let’s dream and scheme.”
And what a wonderful thing to say to a young entrepreneurial person, because I said, “I don’t really know what to do. I love this intergenerational idea, but I’m not sure where to go with it.”
I was in the Institute on Aging at Temple and I really wanted to move in this direction. And she would spend hours with me talking about her life, talking about what she was trying to do. She used to run around the country with Ralph Nader, activating older people to get involved in political things. And she was just such an inspiration to me. So for many, many years, I would go to her, talk about some of the things that I wanted to do with Temple and she was always incredibly supportive.
As she got older, probably in her eighties, she got much frailer and she wasn’t really able to travel as much. Yet she was in a lot of demand. So I was fortunate enough to be able to be her traveling companion to a number of conferences. We presented together. I know one place in New York, it was I think an International Aging Conference. And we went to New York and it was this incredibly reciprocal relationship because here I was, this young 30 something person, not knowing anyone in the aging field, she knew everybody. So she could introduce me to everybody, but she had problems swallowing.
And she asked me to make sure I could keep people away from her when she was eating and just to kind of help her navigate. So on the way up, one of the things that really struck me was we were in the train and we get off at Penn Station and it was really windy. And I said, “Hold on a second, I’ll hail a cab.”
And I looked over and she was holding on to a lamppost because she was afraid of being blown away. She was probably 80 pounds and I just looked at her and I thought, oh my god, here is this incredibly vital woman whose body is failing her. And yet she was as vibrant and dynamic and insightful in her presentation, but she was dealing with her body losses.
And it was a real inspiration to me too, because I saw how she dealt with frailty. She didn’t deny it. She accepted it and she kept going. So it’s not only what she taught me in terms of how to be entrepreneurial, how to take risks, how to fight, how not to give up, but also how to deal gracefully with the process of aging and she died at 90. So she led a very full life.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): And she didn’t found the Gray Panthers until she was 65, right?
Nancy Henkin: Right. So I met her at 75. Yeah.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Wow. So she’d already been at it for 10 years when you met her?
Nancy Henkin: Yeah, and I guess you learn a lot of lessons from people. This is the whole idea of having older role models. I thought I knew a lot at 30. I knew nothing in my 30s.
And there was this woman who had seen the world, who had fought the great fight, who was enabling and empowering older adults to do things. And it was just a great experience for me and I think I’ve carried it with me, and I now feel really committed to mentoring and supporting younger women who want to get involved in social change, because I had such a great role model and I wanna be that kind of mentor for other people as well.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Yeah. 32, 75, that gap is so huge and yet it must have been an incredible foundation for founding an Intergenerational Center. How did you decide that you wanted to go in this direction? How did you end up at Temple studying aging? What was that like?
Nancy Henkin: You know, it was interesting. My undergrad was in community organizing at Simmons College in Boston. So I was a community organizer before Obama. And so I knew I was really into social change. I grew up that way. I was always involved in the civil rights movement. I was always involved in things in the community.
And so I had this degree in community organizing. And when I came to Philadelphia, I started working at Temple and I ended up getting a master’s degree in group dynamics. So I was very involved in how to use groups to foster social change and personal growth. And when I decided to go for my doctorate there, I guess I was thinking about how can I use my community organizing, my interest in group dynamics. But also I had a very personal relationship with my grandparents, particularly my grandfather, and I always was shocked that people were so despairing of older adults because I felt so fortunate to have grandparents.
And my grandfather in particular used to tell me stories coming from Russia and all the things they had to do and how resilient he was with his family. He was 13 when he came over and I was fascinated. Nobody else in the family was, no one wanted to sit next to grandpa, but I did because I just thought it was fascinating.
So when I started doing a lot of kind of humanistic psychology and group process, I thought, well, why aren’t we doing this with older adults? I started doing assertiveness training workshops, primarily with older women. So that was a big thing when I was in school in the 70s. Assertiveness training was very big. I guess it’s not now.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Well, I mean, I think it’s probably still relevant, however, we wouldn’t talk about it that way.
Nancy Henkin: It’s relevant, but I don’t hear about it.
But when I was in my doctorate program, lots and lots of programs were doing this. And again, for women, but there wasn’t that much for older people. And I got involved with some colleagues who were doing humanistic gerontology and thought, well, you know, are there other ways of working with older adults, not just service provision. I ended up doing my dissertation on looking at friendship patterns and self disclosure among older, primarily women. And I was hired by a new institute on aging which was forming at Temple in 1979.
And I was hired because I had a dissertation on aging. No one else knew much about aging, but you couldn’t find aging programs then, but still kind of a little blip on the screen. And one of the first things I wanted to do, I wanted to have this elder hostel, as I mentioned before. So after I talked to Maggie and talked about some of the limitations of an elder hostel, I came up with the idea of having an intergenerational retreat.
So every year for 25 years, and that first year in particular, I brought together 75 people ranging in age from 13 to 100, and we lived at Temple’s Ambler campus out in the suburbs. And it was very mixed racially, socioeconomically, ability wise. It was such intentional diversity. I would make sure I had X number of people, different racial groups, different ethnic groups, someone blind, someone in a wheelchair, and young people from different neighborhoods.
It was really how do you form a community of diverse individuals across ages and all these other factors, and how do you build a sense of connection among them. And the first year I thought, what am I doing? I mean, we were sleeping overnight. We had you know, older people taking out their dentures and young people with their hair dryers.
And we had all these things planned. I’m thinking, what if this doesn’t work? But it was incredible. I remember one thing that first year, We were talking about loss and grief and I looked outside out in the hallway and I saw a young man from the hood and an older white woman from Elkins Park, and I saw them really engage in this conversation.
I thought, well, it was only like the second or third day and I thought, boy, this is really incredible. And I went out and talked to them afterwards and the older woman said, “I can’t believe how sensitive this young man is” and she would never have interacted with this young Latino man from the hood ever.
She said, “I lost my grandson and Eddie was here and he just listened to me and he kind of understood what I was saying.”
And Eddie said, “It’s okay. I just wanted to be here for her.”
It was such a special moment because I realized, you know, we need to create these opportunities for these kinds of interactions to take place. That doesn’t happen on a street corner. And over and over again these things would happen and people who came, we had teenagers rooming with older adults or like a white older adult and black older adult rooming together when there might be some racial tension. We had core groups every day where people would talk about personal issues and we’d do the arts and we talk about loss and grief and we’d do movement.
Luckily I could draw upon my group process experience, but it was really amazing. And after the first year I thought, well, these are just special people, it’ll never happen again. I did the second year and different people, some came back, but I tried to get different people and it was even better and more incredible.
We had a homeless man who somehow was connected. He came five years in a row. No one knew where he was the rest of the year, but the beginning of June he’d reach out to us at Temple and say, I’d like to come back. Now, he lived with us for seven days. You know, what an experience. We had people who were blind from birth. We had people who were very physically impaired as well as very active kids, very active older people.
And what I learned year after year, because I realized, they’re special people every year. And I realize that people, I think, are really seeking this sense of community. They really want to connect and they don’t know how and they stay with their own group.
Especially it was the racial and ethnic mix, as well as the age mix that I think made it so special. And people saw their commonalities and celebrated their differences.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Nancy, how did you recruit these people? Recruitment comes up a lot in conversations about intergenerational work.
Nancy Henkin: Yes. The first year wasn’t that easy. And then we had a lot of publicity about it and it still was not that easy because it costs nothing. It was like $160 for the week, but we targeted a lot of low income people. I’d say three quarters of the people would get some type of coverage of that.
It was not easy to get kids. How many 14, 15 year olds are going to come for a week to spend a week with a bunch of older people. But I’ve worked with schools. We’ve worked through community service. We had a real mix of kids from the suburbs, from the inner city. My son came one year. My father came one year.
And the older people, again, we started looking for the senior centers and then we started working with all different types of groups and word of mouth really expanded the number and the kinds of people we had. But people were nervous. I can’t say that everyone said, oh, yes, I want to go to Ambler and spend the next 7 days or 6 days with all these people.
But after 25 years, we were getting lots of people and we finally had to stop. We didn’t have the funding some staff people had left. But, I always look back and say, I think that was probably one of the most impactful things I ever was involved in and it really influenced how I look at community, how I look at relationships across different factors, and it just was very, very powerful.
And I learned a lot from myself. We had women’s groups, we had men’s groups. A women’s group, we got in concentric circles. I’d do an age line from the youngest to the oldest and then split them into three groups, and the young group would get in the middle. I’d say, what’s it like to be a teenager in whatever it was, 1990 or 1980.
And they’d talk and everyone else had to listen. And then the middle aged people got in and talked about what it’s like to be in their position. And then the older women got in the middle. And it was so incredible for me as I started my 30s and I was doing this until my 50s, to move circles.
So I moved from the middle to the older, and that was really interesting. But again, I never had an experience of talking in depth about really serious issues, even with my mother, you know, you don’t always go in that kind of depth with your parents.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Well, you know, they say it’s easier to skip a generation. Like, it’s easier to talk grandchild to grandmother.
Nancy Henkin: But it’s also easier to talk to people who aren’t related to you because there’s no baggage.
It’s not going to get back to anyone. People were incredibly honest, incredibly open and it motivated me to move on. So I went back and I talked to the director of the Institute on Aging, and I said, you know, this really has legs. We have to figure out where to go with this.
I started writing grants. I wrote a million grants because I saw intergenerational work as a lens, not as a program. We started an intergenerational theater troupe that lasted for 25 years. We had teens and middle aged people and older people learning improvisational skills and going out into the community and addressing a myriad of issues.
We had a program where college students were teaching English to older immigrants and refugees. And we were able to expand that from our site in Philadelphia all over the country to 25 different places. We looked at college students providing respite to frail elders. It’s a time out program. We worked with grandparents raising grandkids. We did arts programs. We did literacy programs. I just realized that it’s anything. If you just say, I’m intentional about bringing generations together to address an issue then you can do anything. Sometimes I felt like the used car salesman of intergenerational work because it wasn’t like, oh, let’s do this or let’s do this.
And I talked to a lot of strategic consultants and they would say, no, no, no, you have to focus on one thing or the other thing. And I said, no, for me, it really is about using the lens and saying, how can it apply to all different things?
Lynsey Farrell (Host): I think that’s the thing, coming into this work, I knew there were silos for the youth work that I had done for 20 years.
And now to realize what Mark Freedman’s always talking about this age segregation, sometimes I even hear age apartheid, which sounds crazy, but that we have just done this, and even as you were doing intergenerational work, that segregation continued.
Nancy Henkin: Of course. It’s one of the biggest barriers. And, you know, what I learned over my many years at Temple, is that you really need systemic culture change, changes in norms and values. And so we still had lots of individual programs, I was there for like 36 years. All these individual programs and many of them were scaled up and went around the country.
But in 2002, I started an initiative called Communities for All Ages, which is what you’re talking about. And I really thought, we have to look at the community level and that’s when I got my Ashoka fellowship for Communities for All Ages.
And so we worked with about 25 communities from tiny little places in the Delta of Mississippi to Kansas and Westchester County in Florida over the place to look at how could you bring different systems together. Bring the youth, aging, maybe environment, the housing, and to look at an issue and address it from a lifespan perspective, because I also realized this whole thing, we think of aging as starting at 60 or 65.
Well, it’s ridiculous. Aging starts at birth and it’s a journey. And if you’re lucky, you get old. And so there are a lot of structural barriers, structural lags, there’s a lot of research on that. You know, are we ready to deal with all of those barriers? Are we changing the education system? Are we changing the work system so that people have opportunities throughout their lives?
And I think we were able to take advantage of a lot of the movements. Like we were very involved with older adult engagement and volunteers. So we started an initiative called Calming of Age, where we’re trying to encourage people over 55 or 60 to engage with the community after they retire. Or even if they weren’t retired. But to contribute to others and to think about lifelong learning.
So I think the concept of aging is changing. For a while it was everyone was frail and then everyone was jumping out of airplanes, parachutes. And now I think it’s important to understand the vicissitudes of aging. You can age in a lot of ways. And we have to create these communities that support people as they age, meaning from birth to death.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): And support people where they are.
That project that you set of having everybody come for seven days to a retreat from all of these different walks of life, it’s sort of just confronting the entire lifespan and really having to navigate that as an individual. I think that’s so powerful to think about all of those generations together.
Nancy Henkin: And when I think about it, I was just talking to my son who is now 41 and he said, at that point he was 16, and it was pretty overwhelming. I mean it was all these people. And my father, too, who had macular degeneration, so he couldn’t see very many people, but he was involved.
And my son said, you know, it was incredibly impactful because he had never met so many different kinds of people with different kinds of experiences and had an opportunity to talk in depth about really personal things and to share history, to share stories in a safe environment.
And so now when I do work, I talk a lot about creating a welcoming, safe, inclusive environment where people can feel free to disclose. There are a lot of reasons right now, even more than before. You know, when I started out there was a lot of negative age stereotypes, of course, they’ve always been around. And the demographics, people kept saying, oh, the world is going to look different. Our country is going to look different. Well, that’s actually here now. We were talking about it in the seventies and now it’s here.
But I think that things have really changed a little bit in that now I think there are other issues to deal with and certainly one of them is isolation and loneliness. And we know the Surgeon General’s report. We know that this has major health effects. And how are we dealing with it? So I think one of the reasons that the intergenerational work is gaining a little more attention right now is people realize it’s not just about doing services for people. It really is about engaging people, reducing isolation, and fostering meaningful relationships.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): It seems to me in the last 2 decades or 15 years that we also realized the division of our country is local. It’s at the very local level, that you’re not talking to your neighbor anymore. You have no reason to actually, because you’re not even like going to the local grocery store anymore because you’re having your groceries delivered. We’ve created such structures of division and we have to be really intentional now to have spontaneous connection.
Nancy Henkin: Yeah, because I think it’s not just that people say, oh yeah, everyone. I do technical assistance all around the world and people say, oh yeah, everyone comes.
I go, well, really? And when they look at who’s coming to something, well, they don’t come. A park can be there. It doesn’t mean, unless you intentionally create programming or create comfortable seating or whatever, people don’t just show up.
So it’s that intentionality about creating a space that’s good for people.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): I don’t think people know where they belong anymore, right? It feels very much that you have to have an in. Like a community in order for you to feel like you can show up. And so we’ve kind of lost all these spontaneous public spaces that would make you feel like you can show up and meet your neighbors and connect with people.
Nancy Henkin: I realized about three or four years ago, I realized I’m doing this work all around the world and I looked around, I live in a lovely neighborhood and I sort of know some of my neighbors, like right next to me, but I don’t know the others. And I said, why don’t we have a block party? And so for the last three or four years, I’ve been organizing these block parties, which, you know, again, is an intentional effort.
People love it. Now, I’m hoping that somebody else will take the responsibility at some point, but people come out, it’s potluck. We have games for the kids and everything. It’s such a little thing. But it’s one of the types of things that you need to do to create a neighborhood that feels inclusive, and we’re probably the oldest on the block, so there are a lot of little kids. If we didn’t do this, would we be connected to other people and the kids in the block?
It’s different when you’re a parent and someone else is a parent and your kids get together, but if you have an intergenerational neighborhood it’s not that easy.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): It’s so interesting. We always talk about the grandmothers creating the tradition and creating the ritual. And there you went.
Nancy Henkin: Well, I figured you’re doing this for everyone else. Why aren’t you doing this for your neighborhood? And actually the first time we met, I did an age line, not by age, but how long people lived in the neighborhood. So we had to go around and talk about what’s the best thing and the worst thing. When did you come here?
And people were like, oh, I didn’t know that. But these are the little things. I mean we have to think about the little things at the local level, but also federal policies, funders. I mean, everything is very siloed, very siloed.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): One of the questions I want to ask you is what are we still not getting right? I mean, obviously it’s 50 years of thinking in this space, what’s not getting done correctly?
Nancy Henkin: One of the challenges, I’m not saying it’s not getting it right, but there’s been a lot of focus on individual programs. So again, I’ve been doing this for over 40 years. I’ve seen fabulous programs come and go because the key person/director leaves or the funding goes and we haven’t institutionalized enough of this.
You know, I have a great school program for four years and then the funding goes and then it’s no longer there. Versus the school district actually saying, well, older volunteers should be here all the time, we should just make this part of what we do. And so I think the focus on programs, not partnerships, or policies has limited.
I think there’s always a need for programs because we have to demonstrate that bringing generations together can work. Because there’s still a lot of negativity around that, especially after COVID. But we have to also think about long term programs and long term sustainability and how do you change the way people think so they think across the lifespan?
So if you have an effort to reduce diabetes in kids And then you have another one over there to reduce diabetes among older people, the root causes are the same. So then you approach it from a lifespan perspective. So I think we have to start doing policies and programming from a lifespan perspective.
I think there’s still rampant ageism. And look at it, we see it every day with all the criticisms of Biden and there’s just still tremendous ageism and there’s a real attempt, I think, internationally to figure out how do we combat ageism. I think if we can think about how intergenerational work can fit into some of these other larger initiatives versus being out here.
Also forever it was like: intergenerational, intergenerational. Again, I felt like this cheerleader and we’re always on the edge. Like, we’re on the outer edge of aging. The outer edge of youth development, but I think we have to be in there saying that bringing generations together has benefits for individuals, for communities, for organizations. We have to promote these partnerships. We have to have funding opportunities for this versus you have to get funded for kids or get funded for older adults. And I think we have to think about the language we use and the norms we have, because in the end, it is about culture change.
It’s about not I, but we. It’s about interdependence. We focus so much on being independent in our country. It’s okay if you’re a baby, but then as you grow older you have to be independent, independent. And so when you get to old age, it’s hard to say you’re dependent.
And so I think this is a huge thing to think, like how do we think about life is long and sometimes you’re going to be dependent, sometimes you’re going to be independent, but most of the time you’re interdependent. And how do we raise that up? And think about reciprocity and mutual benefit that we’re all in this together. One generation really can’t live without the other. This is the way, this is evolution.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): We are a social species. We are a communal species. Yeah.
Nancy Henkin: But to understand that there’s a value in the interconnectedness, that it’s not just about providing a service for someone else, and which is our whole service orientation.
And it’s also, I’m in higher ed, we train people in different disciplines and those disciplines don’t come together. So one of the other things I think we need to do is have more interdisciplinary work. So it’s not just maybe aging or youth that are involved, but get lots of disciplines to start thinking about how can intergenerational work enhance what people are learning.
On a national policy level, on a state level, looking at the built environment. You were talking about spaces is now a whole effort to look at shared spaces. How do we have more shared spaces? How do we look at public space? How do we look at private space? How do we look at senior centers that maybe could be more of a community center? When there’s a Y right here and another senior housing here, how can they work together to create a park that benefits everybody?
It’s just a very different focus to think about common ground.To think both, how do we find common ground, so how do we talk to each other, first of all, and then how do we look across the lifespan, rather than in our bucket.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): I think it’s so interesting as you get older, you get less training almost into what you’re supposed to do at that age. So I feel like when we’re young, we’ve got lots of people telling us this is how you’re supposed to be and what you’re supposed to do. And almost into adulthood, it might just be America, but I think it’s probably global, into adulthood it’s like, you’re figuring things out that you shouldn’t have to figure out by yourself.
I think sometimes why didn’t anybody tell me things about mothering that I should have been told.
Nancy Henkin: Absolutely. I never was prepared for parenting. I wasn’t. And it was hard.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): I feel like I missed a class on growing up somewhere along the way. And I think the case also goes, even as you grow into retirement years and elder years, that you have not been prepared for what life is supposed to be then.
You’re told, okay, your body’s gonna be different, maybe. But you’re not being told, this is a time when you can mentor young people. Like, you should be looking forward to that period of time. We’re not getting these lessons the way that it feels like we should be.
Nancy Henkin: I mean, it was interesting because I did, I don’t know how I did this. When I was 32, I was running pre-retirement workshops for older people at Temple. Now, how ridiculous is that for faculty, right? What did I know at 32? And here, because of my group process, I mean, I could do exercises and things.
But I was into pre-planning, pre-retirement planning. But you know what, once I retired, I’m only semi-retired because I work part time at Generations United as a senior fellow, but I realized that it’s more about your openness and your attitude toward this period of life. I might’ve said something when I was 65 or 67, that I’m going to do this, but retirement evolves.
I feel like for me, I have my hands open and my mind open, and my heart open. And so I’m lucky enough to have this opportunity to be a senior fellow at Generations United. And so I’m engaged in a lot of really interesting things.
I still feel like I’m very involved with the field. But there’s going to come a time when I don’t want to do that. I love to dance. I do a lot of work in dancing and I’d love to do more of that. Maybe when I have more time. So it’s really a question of how do you balance your time? How do you figure out what’s good for you in a moment in time and that things change. Health, finances, all those things really impact what your retirement is.
So I’m not so big on pre-retirement planning now. To think about what’s your attitude to our retirement. Think about starting to explore some things before you retire, and maybe don’t jump off a cliff. I mean, for me, I wasn’t ready to just go from working a thousand hours to sitting in a walking chair. I mean, that just wasn’t me. For some people, they don’t like their jobs. So they feel fine cutting back and doing something else for the rest of their life.
I’m just trying to figure it out as I go along and try to balance things and find new opportunities to learn, new opportunities to contribute, and to be creative. I think creativity is such an important part of life and trying to figure out how to build that in. But these are all lessons that can be shared with other people, but in the end, you’ve got to find your own journey and find the next chapter and be willing to change and to adjust.
Because I know a lot of people are just so scared to retire because they’re thinking, I don’t know what I do, and if I make this decision, you know, it’s going to be the same thing for life. And so one of the lessons I have, no, yeah, you can put your toe in the water if it doesn’t work out, put a toe in a different water and try something else.
I don’t think I realized that enough, that it really is a time of evolving, a time of learning, a time of growing, if you’re lucky enough. Not everybody has choices. I mean, I feel very grateful that I have choices and it’s not so easy for people in other parts of the world who have to work until they drop.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): That’s definitely just not the story that’s told. We at one point, I think, had posted something like, grandmas like to learn. And so it was of course we like to learn, but, you know, it was sort of a counter narrative of people as they get older can’t be taught new tricks. And they’re stuck in their ways.
And actually I have found that there’s a freedom that comes in aging where people start to really say, no, I’m going to try new things. I’m going to do new stuff. I’m going to contribute in new ways. And it’s a much different narrative, actually.
Nancy Henkin: That’s one of the things that Maggie taught me. I can’t remember what the phrase was. I do have a t-shirt something. But it was something like, I don’t care what people think of me right now. I’m going to do what I think is important. And that to me was very freeing. Because I think as women, at least I grew up wanting to please. And I think for people my age was very much a part of this and that’s where the feminist movement, it gave people more freedom.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): That’s why you had to take assertiveness training.
Nancy Henkin: That’s right. Exactly. Exactly. You can tell people what you want to do. Exactly. It was big. It was really big. I think that people do need to think about what their options are and figure out what’s meaningful at this time of life and create those opportunities to share that information. Have women be able to get together. I have a number of women’s groups, but one group we’ve been together for almost 50 years, almost 50 years.
I mean, we talked about what it was like when we were getting married, having kids, sending them to daycare, college, and now we’re retired.
Those are the kinds of things that I think are really important in terms of structures. Finding those places where people can talk and we all know as we get older, social networks diminish. And in our theater troupe that we had, full circle theater troupe, there were two women, one woman I was particularly close with.
And she said, “Nancy, just make sure you have an intergenerational group of friends.” She said, “Because it’s really hard as you get older and you lose your friend network, that suddenly you feel very alone.”
And she was just great. I mean, she was someone anyone would want to hang out with. She just had a wonderful sense of humor. But I’ve always remembered that too. These are the kinds of things that have stuck in my mind. Make sure you have friends of all ages.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): I think that’s such an important takeaway.
Nancy Henkin: But it’s not always so easy, because if you’re not working and people are working, often you meet people when you’re working. Luckily I’m still working, but this dance class that I have, I went today and there are people from like 21. I was the oldest. I feel like I’m always the oldest, but 21 to 75 in this dance class.
I mean, that’s great. And that’s very unusual.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Totally unusual. I know that you’re currently a senior fellow at Generations United. You’re working on projects related to social isolation, but you’re also working, I think, on some other work.
Nancy Henkin: Yeah, I have three big projects right now. It changes, which is again I feel fortunate that I have. I can work on something. I can help with the grant. I can say no, whatever.
One of the things I’m working actually with eight agencies that support kinship caregivers in Philadelphia. William Penn Foundation gave a grant to Generations United so I’m working with a number of them to build their capacity to serve more kinship caregivers and expanded services, and that’s been really great since it’s in Philadelphia. Also I set up this international intergenerational shared site network to look at how people like child daycare centers and older adult centers can come together or how libraries and museums can do more programming.
I conduct a quarterly webinar and we have a quarterly newsletter that I’m just working on right now, which is focused on the arts. How the arts can enhance intergenerational programming. And then the third thing I’m working on is a project in Michigan in higher education. As I said before, I think that we have a lot to do and that higher ed is one way of preparing people early on to think differently.
Right now I’m working with some colleagues there and we’re looking at what kinds of intergenerational experiences are available in colleges and universities. Not a whole lot. And the ones that are, are mostly in the health professions and it’s very transactional.
It’s not focused on really, so there are older people, I’m going to do their blood pressure. I’m going to do health screenings. Maybe I’ll do health education class. But it’s not about getting to know people, understanding what this journey is from birth to death and learning from that. So, we’re going to gather information on talking to higher eds around the country to see what is being done and hopefully set up some type of repository of curricula of kinds of experiences.
Again, it’s a failure of imagination. People don’t do this. There are a million things you could do. There are a million programs. There are a million experiences or a million opportunities. People just have to see this is important. And I think when you said what’s keeping us, I think we’re raising awareness about the value of intergenerational work, but a whole lot more has to be done.
More people, not a small group of people who are very passionate like I am, but how does this become normalized? How do people say, yes, of course, I’m going to get to know my older neighbor or my younger neighbor. Yes, of course, I’m going to bring my family together. Yes, of course, I’m going to learn the stories of my community by interviewing people. Yes, of course, I’m going to engage in learning opportunities so we can be co-learners and co-creators.
So that has to change.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): I think it’s like, you know it when you feel it, but from outside of it, it feels like, ugh, more work, more people I have to connect with. You just have to throw people into it so that they know how beneficial it is.
Nancy Henkin: And that’s going full circle to the retreats that we had. I have run into people over the years. People who say, you may not remember me, Nancy, but in 1986, I was 15 years old and I came to your retreat and it has impacted me and impacted my relationship with my grandparents. And I actually went into social service because of that experience.
Sometimes I feel like Johnny Appleseed. Like you send out a lot of seeds, you plant a lot of seeds, and you don’t know where they’re going to come. But just what you’re saying, by those people being and having that experience, or if juniors in college spend a semester getting to know an older person, I think if we have enough of those and we have enough faculty who understand the value of this, then hopefully people will start thinking differently. And this idea really becomes a normal way of being that people start thinking about how do we connect with each other?
This is just who we are.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): This is how we grow. And that when I get to a certain age, I recognize that now I’m going to be a mentor and that’s going to be, maybe there’s even a rite of passage and I have a cohort with me and we move through this thing together. I mean, to me, I can see it. I can see us getting there.
Nancy Henkin: But it’s also for kids. I don’t know why I was talking to a kindergarten class. I was talking to a kindergarten class and one little boy raised his hand and he said, “Where do old people come from?”
And, and I was like, what? And another little girl raised her hand and she said, “Well, old people come from other old people.”
It’s like you lay an egg and an old person pops out. But it really struck me because again, as a young person, you don’t always realize that you too, if you’re lucky, will get to be old. Versus othering old people like, they’re this, that, have all the negative stereotypes. But young people don’t always see that that’s the path they’re on. Again, if they’re lucky.
And so we’ve got to start young. You know, so part of it is changing the way older people see their role. And a lot of it is how we age in community and from very young years and how we’re exposed to people and how these norms of reciprocity and independence become part of who we are.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Nancy, thank you for joining me today.
Nancy Henkin: Sure, it’s been really interesting, Lynsey. Thank you so much for inviting me.
Lynsey Farrell (Host): Yeah, I’ve learned a lot.
