Are you interested in creating an intergenerational community center at your settlement house?
Intergenerational community centers are spaces that intentionally bring together community members of all ages. They offer regular programs building on the skills and interests all generations have to offer and benefit participants of all ages.
Generations Connect, an initiative of United Neighborhood Houses (UNH), helps settlement houses make intergenerational program approaches a core practice. We have developed a series of tools to support organizations embarking on the multi-year and iterative process of developing an intergenerational community center.
Why are settlement houses perfect for doing intergenerational work?
Intergenerational approaches – like settlement houses - are designed to bring community members together across age to learn, to help and support one another, to work together to address community issues, and to build the multi-aged social networks that enable individuals of all ages and the communities they share to thrive.
What are the steps to developing an intergenerational community center?
There is no one right way to develop an intergenerational community center. All settlement houses are so different, and are responding to vastly different needs in their neighborhoods.
That said, we do believe there is a basic process you can follow to develop your own intergenerational community center. We developed this process over the course of three years, by working with a small group of settlement houses across NYC to help them create intergenerational community centers. Through that collaboration, we learned a lot about what makes truly impactful intergenerational programs at settlement houses and created a suite of tools to share those insights.