National Public Health Week: Aging Cafe
Aging
Café 2020
Vincenza
Bartolillo
Masters
of Public Health
Hofstra
University
The event is held
in the form of a “Café” in order to create an informal, supportive and
comfortable environment to talk about a topic that many people find
uncomfortable, yet unavoidable: Aging. This event is not only directed toward
older adults, but to the community in general. Our event included presentations
and activities for people of all ages, and truly believe it was beneficial to
all who chose to attend. We hoped that by creating an interactive and
information filled event, we can be the start of the change to stop ageism and
discrimination against the older population, and shed light on the important
topics surrounding Aging.
This year our
Aging Café took place on April 21st 2020, and was viewed by the
community in a much different way than previous years. In response to the world
wide pandemic of COVID-19, my fellow peers and I had to transition from holding
an in person event, to presenting our information virtually through Zoom. Changing
this event into a virtual meeting posed a challenge for us. We had our
difficulties in transforming what would have been “stations” into
presentations. Luckily there were some positives that came out of going virtual.
Using Zoom still allowed us to make our presentations interactive. Things like
live polls and the option to chat allowed the viewers to still be active
participants in our event. In addition, going virtual allowed us to reach
audiences that we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to reach such as those who
want to attend but live too far to travel, or those who do not have the ability
to attend in person due to medical reasons. Most importantly, it taught us a
valuable lesson to bring with us into the field of public health. As we know,
programs and events don’t always go as planned in life, so this event showed us
the importance of being flexible and having the ability to adapt to new
circumstances when necessary.
This year, over 115
people across the nation tuned into our virtual Aging Café. Each student pair
took a few minutes to describe their topic and provided the audience with tons
of important information surrounding healthy aging. Some of the topics we
covered were : Audio and visual Simulations of Aging, Social Connectedness of Older
Adults, Creativity and Aging, and Aging Powerfully Through Mindfulness.
Attendees of the Aging Café all received the recording of the event to look
back at the presentations, as well as all resources that were used to create
them. We also sent out an evaluation form via email in order to learn how
effective our event was to the viewers, and what could be improved upon for the
years to come. We hope this event allowed our participants to understand aging
in a different way than before, and that it inspires them to be a part of the
change towards healthy, inclusive, beautiful aging.
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