Adding life to years
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Age-friendly Legacy Quilt


Summary

The purpose of our project, the Legacy Quilt, was to engage seniors and youth to have them create, together, a tangible piece of art that would remind, educate and ask onlookers of all ages to reflect on Summerside’s Age-friendly movement and the 8 domains of the World Health Organization’s Age-friendly Initiative. To make this an intergenerational project, we recruited a senior quilter and youth artists to design and create the quilt. The young artists drew scene’s depicting the 8 domains and then painted the scenes on the quilt pieces that were incorporated into the quilt by the senior quilter. The result was a beautiful representation of an age-friendly community. The quilt has been requested to be displayed at the International Federation on Aging conference and now hangs proudly in the entrance to Summerside’s City Hall.

Key facts

Main target group: Both younger and older people (i.e. intergenerational)

Sector(s): Health, Housing, Information and communication, Social protection, Transportation

Desired outcome for older people:
Contribute

Other issues the Age-friendly practice aims to address:
  • Accessibility
  • Healthy behaviours (e.g. physical activity)
  • Intergenerational activities
  • Inclusion
  • Participation

Contact details

Name: Judy-Lynn Richards

Email address: jlrichards@upei.ca


Age-friendly practice in detail (click to expand):

Engaging the wider community

Project lead: Volunteers

Older people’s involvement: Older people were involved in the age-friendly practice at multiple or all stages

Moving forward

Has the impact of this age-friendly practice been analysed: No

Do you plan to evaluate your age-friendly practice? No

Feedback:
We’ve had much positiive feedback on our quilt and what it represents as well as requests to display in various places for others to see

Looking back

Challenges:
When we consulted with quilters about this project idea, the response was that it is difficult to recruit young people to be interested in quilting. To accept this barrier would be to perpetuate a misunderstanding among the generations. Undeterred by this barrier the Age-friendly Cities Committee came up with the idea to have the youth involved in a different way: have youth design the quilt that the seniors would quilt.