Written By Ng Hong Kai, Volunteer Facilitator with GenLab Collective
As the saying goes – Old is Gold, our elderly seniors have a treasure trove of experiences that are testament to the joys and pain they have gone through in life. Unlike my generation who are fortunate enough to be given an education based on a carefully designed pedagogy and innovative curriculum, our pioneer generation had to endure through lives’ hard knocks in order for them to acquire their current skills that enabled them to make a living. Starting from scratch, they eventually managed to master their unique skills in order to raise a family of their own or survive alone. Hence, hearing about GenLab’s goal of intergenerational bonding through the focus on skills and knowledge sharing, immediately piqued my interest.
With my experience as a facilitator for co-creation with youths, I jumped on the chance to get involved in the Sandbox Programme. Recognizing the accelerating trend of digitalization due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many seniors are now learning to use technology to stay connected with their loved ones. While digital skills for communication and essential needs have become prominent, it is important for seniors to continue participating in their community so that they are not seen as just passive recipients of help. Indeed, in recent years, there have been many opportunities for them to use their knowledge and skills to give back to the community. For example, from the community garden scheme to various befriending initiatives, many seniors have started volunteering in the grassroots during their retirement years. Against this backdrop, I believe that co-creating something with seniors in Sandbox highlights a narrative of empowerment in a community, where the former becomes actively involved, alongside youths like me, to generate positive social impact by leveraging on their life skills and wisdom.
Reflection in working with seniors
Working with 2 seniors on encouraging healthy eating for seniors with diabetes over the past 2 months, I am again reminded of how fluid the process of co-creation can be. After joining the team, I saw how idea generation and brainstorming with the seniors can be so different from doing it with youths that I have been accustomed to facilitating. Tellingly, youths’ ideas often dovetail together with social media marketing and apps/website development whereas the seniors focused more on the practicality of doing things in terms of constraints and feasibility. Furthermore, the ideas generated by each youth usually reflect their personalities, quirks, and needs, resulting in more often than not, a clash of ideas that makes it difficult to reach a compromise. On the other hand, it was easier to achieve synergy with the seniors who were more accepting of different ideas but harder to encourage creative vibrant exchanges during the brainstorming sessions. Therefore, I had to focus less on creating a cohesive group dynamic and more on figuring out the strengths and needs of our seniors.
The biggest challenge for me was building rapport with the seniors over zoom. Given the short time during our online meetings where we had to quickly iron out the next course of action, the team was often task-focused in order to move forward. Seeing myself in our seniors, I sensed that they were contented to be led along by us as we were moving at a faster pace than what they could adjust to. Still, despite following our lead, they never expressed any frustration and simply trusted the process and the quality of our ideas. This helped to strengthen a shared sense of responsibility amongst our team members while making me curious to discover how innovation in the eyes of the seniors would look like? Looking back, I feel that perhaps their life values, outlooks, and experiences are important sources of stability that enable any innovation to be grounded in an enduring foundation of resilience and steadfastness.
Advice for youth facilitators
As such, moving forward, I think youth facilitators who are interested in empowering seniors through Sandbox can try to balance the process of skills sharing and application with values-based inquiries that would give the seniors confidence to showcase their soft skills as well. Hopefully, this would allow for a recalibration of pacing that would invite our seniors to drive certain aspects of the co-creation process without feeling too daunted by the diversity of ideas being suggested. My experience taught me that while we may come to value certain skills more than others, at the end of the day; it is about respecting the dignity of the seniors by focusing more on what they can contribute based on their strengths and needs.
For youths who are interested to reflect, discover and expand on the types of useful skillsets that dignify the lives of our seniors – regardless of their application or association with productivity, I would strongly recommend you all to join Genlab’s Sandbox program!
