Promoting Community Education and Action through Intergenerational Programming.

Abstract

Based upon the concept of promoting intergenerational cooperation as a means for addressing community planning issues, the author developed a community participation program model called 'Neighborhoods-2000'. Projects have been implemented in six neighborhoods in New York State and Hawaii over a seven year period (1987-1993). This paper focuses on the 'Long Island City-2000' project as it included the most extensive program evaluation. Senior citizens worked together with a class of sixth grade students over a six month period on a series of neighborhood exploration, communication, and urban planning exercises aimed at promoting interest and involvement in local development issues. Qualitative data analysis methods, based primarily on comparisons between pre- and post- project questionnaires and interviews, were used to assess program impact on participants' views toward people of other generations and their level of interest and understanding with regard to local planning processes and issues. The results support the fundamental premise of this project model - that children and senior adults have many neighborhood hopes and concerns in common and this commonality can serve to promote intergenerational understanding and concurrent learning about community development dynamics and issues.

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