Generations United Podcast Generations United

Generations United released our 10th annual "State of Grandfamilies" report on November 8, 2023.  The report, Building Resilience: Supporting Grandfamilies’ Mental Health and Wellness, outlines the reasons grandfamilies have mental health concerns yet have more trouble accessing mental health services and supports for both children and their caregivers due to lack of availability, lack of legal authority, and limited understanding of grandfamilies’ needs among providers, cost, stigma, and ageism. This situation has been exacerbated by Covid-19, racial violence, and opioid use, the report found. Children who have faced traumatic loss or traumatic situations which led to them growing up in families without their parents are particularly susceptible to experiencing mental health concerns. Additionally, gaps in America’s social safety net make it harder for these children to receive the care they need.

This event highlighted the key facts, findings, and recommendations from the report and included poetry and spoken word from grandfamilies and a powerful conversation with members of grandfamilies and Dr. Joseph Crumbley about the importance of mental health.

The discussion contains information related to mental health and wellness. It is intended for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. This conversation and the referenced report may contain sensitive or distressing material. If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, please seek immediate help from a qualified mental health professional or contact the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing “988” on your phone.

Speakers:
Donna Butts, Executive Director, Generations United
Sonia Emerson, Child Welfare and Social Justice Advocate, ChildFocus Partners
Brittney Barros, Youth Advocate, Michigan
Angela Clements, Generations United GRAND Voice, Wisconsin
Dr. Joseph Crumbley, Trainer, Consultant, and Therapist
Bob Ruble, Generations United GRAND Voice, California

Special thanks to The Brookdale Foundation Group for making this report and event possible, and to Centene Corporation for their valuable support.

Read the report: https://www.gu.org/resources/building-resilience-grandfamilies-mental-health-and-wellness/
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This event co-hosted by Generations United and RRF Foundation for Aging on October 5, 2023, highlighted the recommendations in the new report Strengthening Cultural Responsiveness in Intergenerational Programs: Passion, Purpose, and Planning to Drive Equitable Change. This event explored the challenges and successes of organizations embarking on a diversity journey and those already prioritizing cultural responsiveness. We heard from a panel of intergenerational program practitioners whose work focuses on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Speakers:
Jatrice Martel Gaiter, Executive Vice President of External Affairs, Volunteers of America and Vice-Chair, Generations United Board of Directors
Serena Worthington, Senior Program Officer and Director of Equity & Inclusion, RRF Foundation for Aging
Kristi Guillory Reid, Report Author and Independent Consultant
Tony Collins, Executive Director, T.I.H.S. Class of ‘74 Read to Me
Genevieve Leighton-Armah, Executive Director, Bay Area Black Leaders and CoGenerate Innovation Fellow
Nikki Moustafa, Housing Director, H.O.M.E.
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From the vaults!  Check out Generations United's webinar on the importance of cultural responsiveness in intergenerational programming. This virtual event held in August 2022 and made possible with support from the RRF Foundation for Aging, was co-hosted by the National Indian Child Welfare Association and the National Caucus and Center on Black Aging and included examples of organizations bringing younger and older people together in diverse communities and provided practical recommendations for designing programs and activities that reflect different cultural norms and values.

About the Speakers
This event was facilitated by Dr. Sarah Kastelic (Alutiiq), Executive Director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association, and featured opening remarks from Generations United's Executive Director Donna Butts.  They are joined by Marva Overton, the Executive Director of the Alliance for African American Health in Central Texas who operates Inter-generational Gardening Soul to Soul, a program that brings youth and elders together to construct and maintain vegetable gardens; Dr. Danica Brown (Choctaw) the Behavioral Health Director at the Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board, a non-profit tribal advisory organization serving the 43 federally-recognized tribes of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho and Katherine Kim the Program Director for the Koreatown Storytelling Program, a multimedia oral history that brings together high school journalists and community elders from the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.
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A few months ago, Generations United released our latest set of free resources—developed with support from RRF Foundation for Aging—aimed to strengthen and expand intergenerational programs. The publications—Making the Case for Intergenerational Programs, Fact Sheet: Intergenerational Programs Benefit Everyone, and Staying Connected While Staying Apart: Intergenerational Programs & the COVID-19 Pandemic—support the growing field of practice by increasing the knowledge and skills of people working to connect and support older adults, children, and youth.

Mary O'Donnell, president of RRF, joined our Executive Director Donna Butts and Ernest Gonzales, Ph.D., who led the development of Generations United's new resources. Dr. Gonzales is also an associate professor and director of the MSW Program at NYU Silver School of Social Work. 

This episode focuses on how the RRF Foundation for Aging came to include intergenerational programs in their funding priorities and what the Foundation has learned about intergenerational programs. The episode also explores what Dr. Gonzales and his research team learned while creating the intergenerational tools. 

Other resources mentioned during this interview include:
Encore.org's The Power of Connecting the GenerationsGenerations United's Stronger Together: Funders Call to InnovationGrantmakers in Aging's Intergenerational Strategies Ohio State University's College of Social Work's Implementation of Evidence-Base Practices in Intergenerational Programming: A Scoping ReviewVisit gu.org for additional resources. Support the show

 A new study from Generations United, Family Matters: Multigenerational Living Is on the Rise and Here to Stay, finds that the number of Americans living in a multigenerational household with three or more generations has nearly quadrupled over the past decade, with a dramatic increase of 271 percent from 2011 to 2021 (7 percent vs. 26 percent).  Our report found that 66 percent of those living in a multigenerational household say the economic climate was a factor in their living arrangement. Among the top reported causes, 34 percent said the need for eldercare was a reason and 34% said childcare was a reason.

In this episode—Larry Nisenson, senior vice president and chief commercial officer of Genworth's U.S. Life Insurance Division—joins Generations United's Executive Director Donna Butts to discuss his own role as a caregiver to his parents, ways employee caregivers can advocate for resources, and how employers can support employee caregivers.

"The best we can do as the advocates for caregivers is try and tell that story and arm the emerging caregiver with all of the tools and help we can provide for them to make that burden as easy as we can." —Larry Nisenson

Resources mentioned in the show:

• Family Matters: Multigenerational Living Is on the Rise and Here to Stay

• GenWorth sites for advocacy: GenWorth.com and CareScout.com 
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Across the U.S., more than 2.7 million children are growing up in grandfamilies — families in which grandparents, other adult family members, or close family friends are raising children.

Generations United, with support from the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, created a brief and national comparison chart, Adoption and Guardianship for Children in Kinship Foster Care, which focuses on adoption and guardianship for children in kinship foster care, so that these children can exit foster care into permanent families.

In this episode, Ana Beltran, co-director of the National Center on Grandfamilies, is joined by Generations United's GRAND Voice Network Members Ms. Genia LaRese Newkirk and Mr. Keith Lowhorne.

Ms. Newkirk took guardianship of her niece, Nadia, after becoming licensed as a foster parent.  Ms. Newkirk had never met Nadia before and didn’t know about her.  They were not offered North Carolina’s Guardianship Assistance Program because the state limits their program to children age 14 and older, and Nadia is about 8 years old.

Mr. Lowhorne, with his wife, adopted three grandchildren from foster care in Alabama:  Kayren, about age 7; Kaiser, about age 6; and Harper about age 4.

Ms. Newkirk and Mr. Lowhorne talk about the options offered and not offered to them when they decided to keep the children in their lives out of the foster care system.

Ana offers resources for families in this situation.

Show resources
Adoption and Guardianship for Children in Kinship Foster Care: https://www.gu.org/resources/adoption-and-guardianship-for-children-in-kinship-foster-care/

Generations United: www.gu.org

The National Center on Grandfamilies: www.grandfamilies.org Support the show