Rethinking: aging and more

“In order to survive, mankind needs a different way of thinking.” Albert Einstein

I’m a big believer in attending conferences. Maybe that’s because I always get salted with fire by new ideas and new people.

And sometimes, you have to go out of town to meet the people back home, as I learned when running into Pat from Interfaith Older Adult Programs and Jeannine, who’s in the UWM Center on Age and Community certificate program in applied gerontology, at the Annual ASA-NCOA Joint Conference in Chicago earlier this month.

Rethinking aging, being leaders, and seizing the chance to do something amazing to improve the lives of older adults was the theme of the conference. I’ll be using this blog as a place to share some of the ideas gleaned there. Please share yours here, too—whether you attended the conference or not.

(You can also explore some of the conference best ideas at the Milwaukee Aging Consortium’s Best Ideas Breakfast March 27.)

Something concrete for you: the Blue Moon Fund has made available for free download a wonderful document: Toolkit for Viable Futures. From the intro:

“If you are an administrator, advocate, or practitioner in
aging, you are on the front lines of planning and providing
services for a society that is aging. How you make your
decisions and use your resources will go a long way to
determine the quality of later life for today’s older adults,
and the legacy that elders will leave for generations to
come. You need strategies that connect the generations.”

Overheard at the conference:

Boomers are just not prepared adequately for aging.

“We need more vaccines, not more Viagra.”

Because the business of healthcare is failing, we need to find ways to promote wellness—and develop structures that make best use of available wisdom.

“We have research that shows if you live in a community where you can get out and go where you want to go, you are doing better than people who can’t do that.”

Perhaps we need to play to find serious answers: “Genius is childhood recalled at will.” (Pierre Charles Baudelaire)

Your thoughts?