Brookdale’s director of strategic initiatives, Christian González-Rivera, and executive director Ruth Finkelstein testified (via Zoom) before the New York City Council Committee on Aging, which held an oversight hearing on Sept. 21 on the future of the city’s senior centers.
The COVID-19 pandemic has presented enormous challenges to older New Yorkers, their families, and the organizations and institutions who care for them. Yet the significant disruption in services for older adults has presented an opportunity to think about how the senior center of the future can help connect older adults to resources and how it can help them be a resource to all New Yorkers.
Senior centers should be older New Yorkers’ portal to all of the city’s resources and services, not just those provided with funds from the Department for the Aging (DFTA). In fact, the senior center of the future should be funded not just by DFTA, but should instead partner with other city agencies, as well as public libraries, museums, and providers of virtual services to provide a richer array of offerings. DFTA’s primary role should be to facilitate those partnerships. Senior centers should help older adults help each other.
Senior centers should also ask what older New Yorkers can do for their city. For instance, senior center kitchens that lie idle outside the lunch service could be funded to cook meals for the homeless or run nutrition education programs led by older adults. Older adults could also teach workshops at senior center facilities that are open to all New Yorkers regardless of age.
Importantly, senior centers can also serve as community resource hubs during and after emergencies. They can be charging stations, places to obtain personal protective equipment, and where the economically displaced can connect to public benefits. Of course, senior centers can be a resource for older adults rendered vulnerable by a disaster. But they can also be an organizing platform for the many other older adults—and people of all ages—taking action to help their neighbors.
