Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston’s Mamie George Community Center hosts the Creative Aging program, an innovative initiative that promotes senior wellness and ingenuity. Under this program, we bring our senior clients into our fully stocked art room, offering a variety of classes including mixed media, painting, crafting, and our popular “Around the Quilt” project, which engages compelling discussions on a different topic each month. We bring in professional, local artists to teach our seniors, showing that creativity has no age limit. It is one of our most popular programs, and we take pride supplying our senior clients with a unique way of expressing themselves. This initiative is done with purpose, as studies show arts and crafts for seniors stimulate the brain, slow down cognitive decline, and improve fine motor skills. Our goal with this program is to establish a positive and fun way to promote senior wellness outside of our social services.
Challenge or Need
Our Mamie George Community Center serves as a hub for Catholic Charities services in Fort Bend County. Many of this community’s needs, particularly those of low-income residents and seniors, are addressed through this facility’s many supportive services. Outside of its general services, Mamie George has a plethora of unique programs to address health and wellness, such as our Creative Aging program.
This program was meant to tackle emotional and cognitive issues seniors face outside of necessities (e.g., food, housing, etc.). Most seniors live on a fixed income, become more sedentary as they age, and often lose contact or connections with family and friends. Studies from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services show that about 28% of people aged 65 years or older live alone. Loneliness is known to contribute to physical illnesses, cognitive decline, and premature mortality for some older people. Our Creative Aging program is meant to address concerns of loneliness and senior wellness by helping them to maintain their emotional wellbeing or sharpen their cognitive function. As one of our most popular classes, results show that creative expression activities such as arts and crafts bring about positive emotions within our senior clients, while also giving them a sense of accomplishment.
Why It’s Innovative
The overall goal of the program is to promote emotional and cognitive wellness within our seniors. Catholic Charities’ Mamie George Center is a nonprofit dedicated to addressing local community needs, with an emphasis on low-income residents and seniors. We initiated the Creative Aging program to improve wellness in seniors, giving our older clients a way to express themselves while generating community and comradery. We partner closely with local artists who specialize in a variety of art forms to help our senior clients with their creative expression. This program is also responsible for creative pieces that have been donated or sold to art lovers around Houston. The innovation in this program is shown through its ability to establish a sense of wellness and aid with emotional expression in our senior clients through arts and crafts.
Program Impact
This initiative has had an amazing impact on our seniors by promoting wellness and creative expression. As one of our most popular programs, Creative Aging is full of eager seniors in each class. With some undercover Van Goghs in our program, we have had the honor of donating and even selling some of the artwork done by our extremely creative seniors. Our reports show that this past fiscal year, Mamie George offered 608 art classes with seniors participating over 1,700 times each quarter.
Lessons Learned
The most important lesson learned under this initiative is that a “network of support services” is more than providing necessities for vulnerable populations. It also includes helping people create better lives for themselves, physically and mentally. Many seniors find it difficult to establish comradery on their own, leading to a lack of emotional expression. With our Creative Aging program, we are giving our senior clients something they look forward to each day—and that is the ability to express themselves creatively and make some friends while doing so. Other Catholic Charities agencies could benefit from using this program as a model at their community centers.