On Thanksgiving Day, you were probably at home enjoying a relaxing time with your family. Or perhaps, you stayed on Penn’s campus and took advantage of one of the many free Thanksgiving dinners offered by the student residences.
For many of the elderly in Philadelphia, Thanksgiving is a different kind of holiday, one marked by loneliness and isolation.
For a Management 100 project, our team, Aged to Perfection, tried to show love and compassion to 30 elders by organizing a Thanksgiving dinner at Casa Farnese, an affordable housing unit for seniors in Center City. We collaborated with Little Brothers – Friends of the Elderly, a nonprofit organization that promotes service that “begins by being a friend” and reaches out to seniors who have no family in the immediate area.
During our wonderful evening at Casa Farnese, we realized that conversation is the most effective means of connecting with people. Yes, it was important to secure donations of food, quality entertainment groups and attractive decorations, but most of all, the seniors appreciated that young people were taking the time to sit down and get to know them. Conversation started politely and tamely, but then the elders started joshing with each other. We felt like a small nation in a proxy war as they recounted embarrassing moments and pranks they had pulled on each other. One lady explained the jitterbug to us while another evaluated Daniel Craig as the new James Bond.
Although Penn has many community service opportunities that allow us to tutor children and volunteer in schools, few, if any, of the clubs on campus promote direct engagement with senior citizens in Philadelphia.
This is saddening because, in many other cultures, elderly people are highly respected. In China, for example, parents live with their children in their old age. In American Indian societies, the elderly serve as keepers of knowledge and wisdom. The elderly have so much to teach us about their values, travels, struggles and relationships.
Today, the elderly face many problems in the United States, such as poverty (87 percent of the seniors served by LBFE live at or below the poverty line), ageism, the high cost of health care and lack of family support. By taking the time to forge relationships with seniors in the local community, students can learn how to ensure that seniors’ needs do not get overlooked in policy discussions.
Although the residents of Casa Farnese seem to have forged true friendships with one another, in the absence of a solid support system, it is easy for seniors to grow depressed as they come to terms with their decreasing mobility and the loss of loved ones. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, suicide rates among those aged 65 and over are higher than the national average.
Penn students can play an important role in providing hope and encouragement to seniors living nearby by organizing social events, like our Thanksgiving dinner, visiting or phoning seniors on their birthdays or escorting an elderly person to the grocery store or to the doctor’s office.
Volunteering is a life-changing experience. Wharton freshman Hamdi Soysal, a member of Aged to Perfection’s operations committee, said, “I really want to come back to spend more time [at Casa Farnese].” Since the LBFE project is an annual offering in Management 100, Soysal hopes that next year’s students will take advantage of the opportunity to visit the venue more frequently to befriend the elderly prior to the Thanksgiving dinner.
All in all, we will never forget the laughter we shared with the seniors or the seeds of wisdom that they passed on to us. At the end of the dinner, a very warm and funny lady named Connie gave us the following advice: “Make the most of life because it passes by very quickly, and do a lot for this country because I’m counting on you young people.” As students who are privileged to study at one of the nation’s top universities, we must try our best to not let her down.
If you would like to learn more about geriatric issues and how you can help out at Casa Farnese, visit philadelphia.littlebrothers.org.
This column was written by College freshmen Richard Wess and Myles Wolfe and Wharton freshman Leah Davidson.
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