Growing up, I didn’t have a chance to develop relationships with my grandparents (or uncles and aunts for that matter), and I longed for intergenerational mingling — to have older people who cared about me beyond my parents and my teachers.

At Humanitas, a residential care facility in the Netherlands, young students and artists live rent-free in exchange for spending at least 30 hours a month socializing with some of the 160 elderly residents.

They do the things professional staff cannot always do — such as spending time, just hanging out. Gea Sijpkes, the head of the Humanitas retirement home says it well:

“When you’re 96 years old with a knee problem, well, the knee isn’t going to get any better, the doctors can’t do much. But what we can do is create an environment where you forget about the painful knee.”

Watch this moving video about the program here:

Wanting to create a warm environment, the director thought outside of the box. By utilizing this design-style thinking, she was able to bypass budget concerns and tap into a connection that hired-staff cannot provide. The goal is, “to avoid creating care ghettos not to isolate the elderly from the outside world.”

A resident student described the relationship: “We bring today’s life to people who without us would still live in the past, and we learn from people who bring experience from their past, so I don’t make certain mistakes in the future.”

The Dutch government has made big cuts in healthcare funds. Helping each other, as a society, is one of the solutions to lack of funding resources.

When I had my own children, I hoped they would have a three-generational experience. They did, but only for few years. And once my parents passed, I kept thinking that there are so many elderly in NYC who would enjoy buying an ice cream cone and spending an hour with a boy. Similarly, there are so many children who could learn volumes from walking an older person across the street.

I imagine that patience, tolerance and communication skills would all be part of the first lesson. The older one would share stories from the past. The young one would relate stories from school today, and both would sharpen each other’s mind and broaden their hearts.

The bond across the lifespan is one of the most unique exchanges we can have. And when it happens between people WHO are not of kin, it can be even more fulfilling to engage in a creative community of choice. A win, win.

Instead, we tuck our most wise generation away in safe, but stale, places. We isolate and neglect them, while knowing that having purpose and social value is a key antidote to death. While on the other end of the spectrum, too many people live far from family and suffer from of isolation.

Bringing back intergenerational mixing on a daily basis would be good for everyone — young and old(er).

In countries like Mexico, China, and Senegal generations intermingle daily and that is the norm, not the exception. Ohio already has already established similar intergenerational housing.

When do we get such a facility in New York City?

How can we make innovations to challenge the way American culture segregates its elderly?

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