After, The first successful “Inter-generational Dialogue between youth and seniors” with MomAfrica, we were approached to do a second one!, This time around we partnered with “The University of the Third Age in Athlone”, known as “The Athlone U3A” and MomiAfrica once again to bring Our Future Leaders “The Youth” & Our Senior Citizens together to discuss and solve complex problems that our seniors and young people have to face on a day to day basis.
The Inter-generational Dialogue created an opportunity for voluntary partnership between youth and seniors with a focus for Community Service. We had 34 seniors and 34 youth join us for this event. When the seniors and youth arrived we had them separated into groups having an even spread of the two per group. Before the programme had started, a natural flow of conversation had taken place between these individuals with vastly different walks of life.
To kick off the Dialogue, we started with a check-in allowing everyone to get better acquainted. We then went on to the first activity “Me now, Me later” having them create a persona of who the individual is now in their youth and who the individual will be as a senior. The second activity was “Let’s chat” having them converse about the services the youth could provide for the seniors and how seniors could provide support that the youth may need. The third activity was “Take action” where they’d select one of the services that youth could provide and have them explain what that process would look like. Once they’ve completed the third activity they went on to build a prototype of what that process would look like.
The objective of this Dialogue was to have these individuals with different perspectives come together, express their needs and how they could potentially assist each other in certain developmental areas namely, skills training and community service
In the words of John C. Maxwell: “Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.”
