A message from our Founder, Keerthana
GenLab Collective is a new ground-up initiative that was just started in May 2021 where we first piloted our idea of kick-starting conversations with seniors and understanding more about the unique skills, knowledge, and/or experiences that they have to offer. We are a small team of passionate youths, seeking to empower seniors to share their valuable skills and knowledge, with the aim of making them feel valued even in their later years.
We have seen how the recent COVID pandemic has taken a toll on seniors as well, with the seniors reporting an increase in suicide rates over the past year. Even seniors who were living together with their loved ones, shared feelings of increasing loneliness, boredom and not knowing ways or platforms to keep themselves meaningfully engaged and occupied.
All along, we may have been emphasizing the concept of lifelong learning among our seniors, but little we may have thought about empowering seniors – How can we provide seniors with the right platforms, opportunities, and tools to showcase their unique strengths, skill-sets, or even contribute back to the community? Some of our seniors during our initial chats with them shared about how they were looking for ways to just give back and share with others about their skills and knowledge, they have so much to offer but did not know of the right platform to do so.
Hence, at GenLab Collective, we hope to provide our seniors with fun and innovative opportunities to showcase themselves. Through this process of skills sharing and engagement with the larger community, we hope to raise awareness of the unique strengths of our senior community. We also hope to encourage inter-generational bonding where seniors have the opportunities to interact with younger generations, resulting in the meaningful exchange of skills, knowledge, and experiences. A newly launched concept, being the Sandbox Programme, is an innovative model, where a pair of seniors and youths come together to co-create resources relating to their domain of interest. The idea of a Sandbox means a safe, experimental space to try new ideas and collaborate to create innovative resources using the concept of design thinking.
If you are keen to come on board as a senior sharer or support us as a facilitator, join us here! If you have any further clarifications about our initiative, or would like to partner with us, drop us a message on our contact form! Alternatively, you may drop us an email at [email protected]
