Thursday, May 31, 2012

Art Opportunities for Older Adults

Interested in connecting older adults in your service area with opportunities for artistic expression and development? The Lifetime Arts organization and the Alzheimer's Poetry Project both offer unique opportunities to engage older adults creatively, using the library.

About Lifetime Arts:

"Libraries, the most universal and most democratic of America's cultural institutions, are "age neutral" and so appeal to older adults who are reluctant to go to senior centers. Increasingly important as community centers for learning and cultural access, libraries are ideally positioned to evolve as centers for creative aging.

Now in its third year, CREATIVE AGING IN OUR COMMUNITIES: THE PUBLIC LIBRARIES PROJECT is based on a vision for mobilizing the trusted, neutral, information-rich public space of the library to deliver arts education for and with older adults. That vision includes building effective collaborations between teaching artists and librarians and building the capacity of different library systems to carry out and sustain creative aging programs. Our work to date affirms this vision. Teaching artists and librarians find that they share a vision for positive aging and bring complementary strengths to designing and implementing meaningful programs for older adults."

About Alzheimer's Poetry Project:

"The mission of the Alzheimer's Poetry Project is to facilitate the creativity of people living with Alzheimer's disease and related dementia. We engage people navigating memory loss in an exciting call and response performance during the first half of the workshop. The session leader recites lines of classic, well-loved poems and the group joins together in echoing the words. During the second half of the workshop the well-known poems serve as inspiration and models for a communal creation of an original poem. Each session ends with a performance of the group's newly created poem, giving recognition to the lines and words the participants have contributed.

We seek to bond together as a community built on shared words, passions, and discoveries through the performance and creation of poetry. The National Endowment for the Arts listed the APP as a best practice for the NEA Arts and Aging initiative. The APP was awarded the 2012 MetLife Foundation Creativity and Aging in America Leadership award in the category of Community."