What Lively was and why it mattered.

Intergenerational care is a time-honoured practice with the potential for personal and collective change.

Intergenerational care relationships are not new.

Throughout history, and in living Aboriginal cultures today, Elders have played a vital role in guiding and mentoring young people.

However, in the West, as our relationship with the market has come to define how our community values us, we have abandoned many traditional structures where older people were custodians of cultural knowledge, and face an increasingly generationally-fractured community.

Lively was a response to this complex and fragmented landscape, which has given birth to a number of collective challenges.

Social Isolation

1 out of 5

seniors (65 and older)
experience loneliness

Youth Employment

23%

of young Australians are unemployed or underemployed

Workforce

110,000

additional direct aged-care workers are needed by 2030 to meet demand

The concept of Lively was simple: employ young jobseekers to support the wellbeing of older community members, while building a meaningful relationship.

Lively recruited young adults (aged 18–25) with minimal or no prior experience or qualifications; provided them with in-house training and mentorship; and employed them to provide in-home and community-based support to older people, with a focus on cultivating relationships of trust and mutual learning. This promised to offer a number of benefits:

Combat ageism

Research has demonstrated that intergenerational relationships are one of the most effective ways to combat ageist attitudes and age-based discrimination.

Reimagine and expand the aged care workforce

Currently Australia relies overwhelmingly on family carers and professionalised support workers to support the needs of older community members. By offering more hands-on in-house training and support, Lively’s model opened up a new, untapped, audience in the community to participate in the aged care workforce: young people without previous experience and qualifications but who had an interest in older people.

Our experience demonstrated to us that there was a large and enthusiastic community of young people who would step up to the plate if given the opportunity.

Provide a future-proofed employment pathway for young people

Blah blah blah

A more empowering care relationship

How care can be reimagined as a two-way exchange, where older people are contributing to and enriching the people who support them, as much as the other way around

How we can create new spaces in the fabric of everyday life for older people to play meaningful roles, sharing experience, skills, etc. with younger generations.
How intergenerational connection benefits both younger and older people - the benefits that flow to both through interacting.

Call to action for local governments, aged care providers, youth employment/development organisations, etc. to consider how they can bring these ideas into their work, and to build on what we already learned about how to do it well.