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https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/feb/06/young-old-and-marvellous-how-a-care-home-built-a-nursery-and-everyone-thrived>
"It is lunchtime in the bistro at Belong and half a dozen toddlers are tucking
into sausage cassoulet, mash and seasonal vegetables. Anyone acquainted with
the table manners of two- and three-year-olds may well be bracing themselves
for carnage. Yet green beans are being happily pronged with forks rather than
chucked on the floor and some faces don’t even need a wipe. To underline this
dining miracle: one little girl is wearing a white top that survives a
tomato-based sauce.
For this remarkable scene we can thank the calming presence of Bill Wall, who
sits in the middle drinking a cappuccino and gently encouraging the children to
have a few more mouthfuls. This 87-year-old former electrician has become one
of the children’s “grandfriends” – “our Bill”, they call him. Since he moved
into the intergenerational community in Chester last year, he spends almost as
much time down in the nursery as up in his care home suite.
Wall struggles to talk these days, but he does not need words to communicate
with the children. One of his lunch companions is three-year-old Jacob
Farrell-Ogunyemi, who is on his third helping of cassoulet. His mum, Maeve
Farrell, a teacher, is delighted not just with Jacob’s increasingly adventurous
appetite but also the relationships he has formed with Bill and his other
grandfriends. Farrell is from Northern Ireland and her partner is from London:
“We don’t have any family here. So I was mindful of Jacob missing out on that
and how much you can learn from people of different ages.”
Belong Chester claims to be the first older people’s “care setting” in the UK
to include a fully integrated children’s research nursery, where children and
residents come together every day. It opened last year in a purpose-built,
five-storey complex in Chester city centre constructed of handsome red brick.
The ground floor bistro and hairdressers are open to the public, with the care
home element contained in six 12-person “households” on the upper floors, along
with 23 apartments available for older people to rent or buy.
It is bright and cheery, the sort of place you’d choose to have your lunch,
even if it wasn’t included in your nursery or nursing home fees. Many residents
have dementia, but all have the opportunity to interact with the children on a
daily basis, studied by academics from nine universities researching the
physical and mental health benefits of intergenerational living.
If the idea is familiar to you, it is probably from the Channel 4 series,
Old
People’s Home for 4 Year Olds. The show took inspiration from the
intergenerational communities that started springing up in Japan in the 1970s,
and brought together a group of preschoolers and the St Monica Trust retirement
community in Bristol. Everybody loved the series, says Sue Egersdorff,
co-founder of Ready Generations, the charity that operates Belong’s nursery.
But, she says, the multiple series of the show “haven’t done us any great
service, because all they do is present all the lovely cutie bits”. TV made it
look too easy."
Via
Positive.News
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*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
