Lifetime Arts Roster Teaching Artist, Greacian Goeke, has taught her signature class, “Free to Move: Expressive Movement & Rhythm for Brain & Body Health,” at the Albany Senior Center outside of Oakland, CA for the last 10 years. The class is an opportunity to, “…interact and explore the expressive language of movement, sharpening both physical and mental agility.”
Greacian and her students were devastated when COVID-19 forced the Albany Senior Center to shut down. However, she immediately reached out to her students to propose continuing online via Zoom.
In this Lifetime Arts “Teaching Artist Talks” video, Vinny Mraz and Antonia Perez discuss Vinny’s experiences engaging and recruiting participants for creative aging programs held in senior centers.
“Enriching the Lives of Older Adults through Arts Education,” explains what creative aging programming is about, underscores the value of employing professional teaching artists whose curricula and teaching style provide a socially-supportive learning environment, and demonstrates the positive impact that these programs have on the older adults who participate.
Produced and edited by Annie Montgomery and Jacqueline DuMont for Lifetime Arts.
© 2020 Lifetime Arts Some Rights Reserved
Supported wholeheartedly by Brooklyn Public Library’s (BPL) leadership, creative aging programming has become an integral part of the library’s offerings for their older adults. By leveraging pre-existing resources and infrastructure and dedicating support towards the programs, the Brooklyn Public Library has been offering creative aging programming successfully since 2011.
When the COVID-19 crisis began, the staff at Greenwich House in New York City worked tirelessly to ensure that all of their members had access to the meal services that they absolutely rely on. However, in the midst of this lifesaving work, they also knew that they needed to think about how to keep their social, artistic, and learning programs going strong to fulfill the social and creative needs of their membership.
Greenwich House wasted no time pivoting many of their in-person programs to online delivery. Working with their teaching artists and the communications team, nearly 40 percent of their classes are now available to livestream.
In this interview with poet and teaching artist, Dave Johnson, he talks about how he got started as a teaching artist at Poets House, a poetry library in New York City. His teaching artist career led him to teaching poetry workshops to older adults in Brooklyn libraries, but mostly in senior centers, day centers, nursing homes and live-in facilities. Dave also shares his experiences working with older adults, along with the skills, challenges, surprises and rewards.
