ECEC in focus – Una Springwood’s intergenerational initiative brings young and old together through connection and care

Bridging generations through shared experiences, a new program at Una Springwood is delivering meaningful outcomes for children and aged care residents alike.

Spearheaded by Centre Manager Tracey Adams, the initiative sees children from the early learning service visiting neighbouring aged care home Arcare for weekly connection through play, conversation and celebration. Drawing on more than 35 years in early childhood education and care, Ms Adams says the program has been a career highlight one that nurtures empathy, respect and community in equal measure.

It has always been a dream of mine to incorporate our younger generation in with our elderly. After witnessing the smiles and the looks on the residents’ faces when I used to visit my nanna in her aged care facility with my grandchildren was priceless.

The previous two services that I had worked at, unfortunately, couldn’t take part in anything like this due to location, so when I applied at Una and they invited me over to visit the location of the new building I couldn’t contain my excitement. To know that we were being built right next to Arcare was amazing. 

I expressed my excitement to our Operational Manager, and she told me to go for it, after sitting and talking and looking at risk assessments it was time to approach the Aged Care facility to see if they would come on board. 

We had only been open for 4 weeks when I received a phone call from Oscar who runs the patient liaison’s at Arcare to ask If I would like to go over and have a meet and greet and discuss a visit with the children which I happily accepted. 

On going over and meeting with Oscar we decided on fortnightly visits on a Friday morning from 10.00-11.30. On our first visit we took 2 staff and only 4 children, we had 6 residents come down to play putt putt golf with us and bean bag toss. On the following visit we had 10 residents, the children and the residents were enjoying it so much we decided to do weekly ones instead, on some visits we can have 15 plus residents come down for a play or just to have a chat with the children and the staff. 

Each week we participate in different activities such as- putt putt golf, lawn bowls, bean bag tossing, art and craft, cooking experiences, puzzles, balloon hitting and cookie decorating.

At Christmas time we participated in helping the residents decorate two out of their three big Christmas trees and participated in their concert where we joined in singing and dancing with the entertainer. We were so excited to be represented in their quarterly newsletter to all families with 4 full pages of happy snaps from our visits.

This has had a big impact on our QIP as it is such a big part of our community involvement that is growing on a weekly basis, we have added all of our steps taken, risk assessments, pictures, newsletters etc. 

Everyone who tours our Service is told about this amazing adventure that we have become a part of and love the fact that their child will get to interact with our elderly generation as a lot of our children have grandparents or great grandparents that live interstate or overseas. 

On a visit after Easter, I had noticed that one of our regular weekly residents was not in attendance and when I asked, I was told that they had just recently passed away. Even though this is the sad part about the visits, it was lovely to hear from the Head staff how much our weekly visits had been to her from her daughter, and how it made her day every Friday to know that we were coming over to sit and talk and visit with her. 

Our children are always asking if they can go and visit the older children that live next door, as this is what they refer to our friends as.

We have set up a beautiful display in our foyer to represent our amazing adventures from where we started to where we are now, and we even have our 2 ½ year olds sit and look at the pictures and ask if they can go with us. So, this is something we are going to look at incorporating into our upcoming adventures in the future.

For any service looking at doing this, please try as hard as you can as it is absolutely life changing, not only for our younger generations but also for our elders. I feel in my 35 years of Teaching and working in the Early Education Sector that this is the most valuable, meaningful journey that I have been a part of and hope to continue to be part of until my childhood journey ends. 

Intergenerational programs create environments where people of all ages feel valued and connected. It allows our older generations to share their knowledge, culture and life’s lessons to the younger generation coming through. 

Tracey Adams is the Centre Manager at UNA Springwood with 35 years of experience in the Early Education Sector and describes this intergenerational journey as the “most valuable, meaningful journey” of her career, advocating passionately for other services to embrace similar initiatives. 

To find out more about UNA Springwood visit here.