The Gift Exchange: Artists, Elders, and Creative Witnessing (Rowena Richie)
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The Gift Exchange: Artists, Elders, and Creative Witnessing (Rowena Richie)
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About this listen
During COVID-19, Rowena Richie and her colleagues were struck by the unprecedented isolation faced by elders. Their response was to connect artists—suddenly without performance venues—with older adults through a project called "For You." What makes this approach unique is its focus on reciprocity. "We started calling it a gift FOR them," Ritchie explains, "but then it really became a gift WITH them."
Richie took these insights into her work with Memory Cafes, where people with dementia share poems aloud, and as a Fellow with the Atlantic Foundation's Global Brain Health Institute, where she observed different cultural approaches to care around the world.
Collectively, these experience help us see what creative care can accomplish: reciprocal courage, patient listening, and the recognition that each of us—regardless of age or cognitive ability—has something valuable to give.