The subject of an upcoming documentary, Providence Mount St. Vincent is a nursing home in which the 400 residents regularly share the facility with over 100 preschool age children as a part of the Intergenerational Learning Center program. The program is designed to prevent nursing home residents from becoming lonely or bored, while providing children with education and a chance to practice friendship and empathy. Some of the activities the decades-apart friends participate in include reading together, making sandwiches for local homeless shelters, creating collaborative art projects, and more.
Providence Mount St. Vincent administrator, Charlene Boyd, explained to PBS Newshour her inspiration for maintaining the program: “All of us have common needs to be recognized. All of us have common needs to be loved, and all of us have common needs to share life together. And so these children bring life and vibrancy and normalcy. It’s a gift. It’s a gift in exposing young families to positive aspects of aging, and it’s a gift of also having children seeing frailty, normalcy and that’s part of that full circle of life.”
View the trailer for the documentary above, and read more about Providence Mount St. Vincent here.
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