Painted on a canvas was the memory of a rural farm in Nebraska. With birds soaring high above a red barn, a river alongside vibrant greenery and trees, it represented a senior’s cherished memory of her upbringing.
This was one of the many paintings that seniors helped create on Aug. 15, at Brookdale North Fremont memory care facility, at a painting and storytelling workshop. Memories resurfaced for many seniors, as they were guided through the process of painting fond recollections from their life.
The event was the result of a collaboration by interns working for Fremont Mayor Raj Salwan, Lives To Tell (an app used by the interns to interview seniors) and the staff of Brookdale North Fremont.
“There’s about 40 youth across Fremont who were selected through an application process [for the mayor’s internship] and we work on one major project to help improve the lives of Fremont’s community,” said intern Arush Savla. “So, for our subgroup, we’re working on art workshops for seniors. This is the first senior care home that we’re going to, but we’re also investigating other places that we can work on in the future.”
Leading the charge was Iris Zheng, a senior in high school and intern for Lives To Tell and Salwan. As an artist and someone with a connection to older folks, Zheng was inspired to try and help seniors through her art expertise.
“I’ve always loved working with seniors,” Zheng said. “I have grandparents at home, and I’ve also been volunteering at a hospital since I want to go into [medicine]. I just love working with older folks because they have such great advice, and I love hearing their stories. And on the other side, I’m an artist. I thought to combine the two, and then I reached out to a couple of senior homes around, and this was the senior home that responded, and so they hosted us.”
“We want to entail that we focus on activities that individuals would enjoy. It’s a person-centered approach,” said Maria George, the Clare Bridge program coordinator at Brookdale North Fremont. “Iris reached out to me, we discuss[ed] her idea as a volunteer, what the program entails. I had to discuss in detail with her the type of residents and the type of level of programming that the people here can adapt to…Tweak the project to something that they can adapt to and enjoy.”
Family members of seniors who accompanied them expressed positive sentiments about the workshop. “It’s been good. It brings back [and] forces them to use some of their memories,” said Janet Mullen, daughter-in-law of one of the seniors. “She didn’t really do a whole lot on this, but it was all her ideas.”
Interns and volunteers also enjoyed the activity and learned from the process. “It’s been eye-opening for me to hear about the memories that these seniors had,” said Savla. “It’s helped me kind of connect and remember some of my own relatives and the experience that they had growing up in the Bay Area.”
At the end, after the seniors finished their paintings, it was revealed that the paintings came together to form a path and mural that connected their experiences and memories together.
Great report. This is such a lovely event. Wish we have more events like this in the future for the senior residents in Fremont.