Students help keep seniors ‘young at heart’

When many students think of a nursing home they don’t consider it a fun place to spend free time. But that’s just the idea that Young at Heart wants to disprove. Young at Heart is a student led group on campus at GCSU directed by servant leaders – juniors Hillary Daniel and Brad Fleming. The group was formed to serve senior citizens in the Milledgeville area and was formerly known as Adopt-a-Grandparent. Daniel elected to change the name of the group to better fit the organization.

“The program is not just adopting a grandparent. We also do activities with the residents such as bingo and parties. The residents still like to do activities and have fun; their bodies are just older than their minds. They are still young at heart,” Daniel said.

Despite the name change the group has been doing volunteer work since 2001. Young at Heart meets once a month to coordinate and plan activities. Student volunteers are not required to volunteer a minimum number of hours.

“We understand that people have a limited amount of time with school and social life. Whatever you can give, that’s what you give,” Fleming said.

Fleming said there is a large need for volunteers and elderly care facilities greatly appreciate any volunteers who spend time with residents. Fleming tries to instill a strong sense of purpose within the group.

“We have a mission statement to provide service and companionship to senior citizens in the Milledgeville community. What we do basically as volunteers for Young at Heart is we go out in the community, usually nursing homes like Green Acres or Chaplinwood, and we’ll do things like bingo,” Fleming said. “If you ask any of our volunteers they’ll tell you we play a lot of bingo. At Green Acres we have a pretty cool program that we help sponsor which is we give out what are called bingo bucks and they act as money in the facility. You can come to our bingo store which we have every other week and you can buy snacks, you can buy Cokes.”

The group participates in many other activities with residents at local nursing homes including meeting one-on-one with residents, making cards, painting, playing games and participating in other activities that the staff comes up with at Green Acres. Daniel has been volunteering at nursing homes since she was in the sixth grade. More recently, Daniel has been volunteering for the past three years at Green Acres in Milledgeville.

Jennifer Avant is the activities coordinator at the Green Acres nursing home. Avant welcomes any assistance from volunteers but she has come to know both Fleming and Daniel well over time.

“The two of them in the past two years have done more for the nursing home and more for the residents than maybe 10 people could have done. It’s not necessarily the quantity of the people that you have, it’s the quality,” Avant said.

Avant plans at least one event for her residents a day though she shoots for three. The events must be varied enough to attract the attention of the residents. Avant looks for help from volunteers to make those events possible.

“Volunteers are a big deal to me because I cannot reach everybody and it’s very frustrating at the end of the day when you have this really great party and you have this great day, and you walk down the hall and there’s that one little person that hasn’t gotten out of their room the whole day,” Avant said. “You can’t meet everybody’s needs. It is great to have volunteers that can come in and maybe run that activity.”

Avant graduated from GCSU with a bachelor’s degree in Art Marketing but found her direction helping the elderly. She believes that people not familiar with elderly care facilities are often nervous and uncomfortable with the thought of spending time in one.

“There’s so much of a stigma with nursing homes. Everybody thinks that a nursing home is somewhere that you just go to die. I wish that we could get it out there that it’s not like that. We have people that have lived here for 20 years. This is their home. They have stories behind them,” Avant said.

Young at Heart is hoping to see membership rise so that it can bring joy to as many senior citizens as possible. Nursing homes welcome anyone with any level of past experience, as it often only takes a little time to brighten someone’s day.

Posted by Drake Simons on Feb 12 2010. Filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry