By Lisa Watts
LTSS Center Fellow Caitlin Coyle is leading an effort to help senior centers in Massachusetts improve the services and supports they offer to older adults.
The notion that a senior center is where you go for bingo and a hot lunch has been outdated for years, but especially so in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Senior center staff—challenged to keep their communities of older people connected, informed, and engaged while keeping them safe from the virus—quickly transformed their centers into hubs of information and activities, delivered online and in person.
Caitlin Coyle and her team at the University of Massachusetts Boston are helping community-based organizations across Massachusetts plan, develop, and improve services and support for older adults and people with disabilities. Requests for their services have doubled this past year.
Coyle is a research fellow at the LeadingAge LTSS Center @UMass Boston and at the Center for Social and Demographic Research on Aging at UMass Boston’s Gerontology Institute.
Cities and towns are channeling some of their American Rescue Plan Act money into programs for older residents. The federal COVID stimulus funding passed by Congress in 2021 must be spent to help populations who were disproportionately affected by the pandemic, as older adults were.
“Often the impetus is that [senior center staff] want to be more relevant to the community,” Coyle says. “The 60-plus population is very different today from 20 years ago. A lot of the work is understanding who the population is and what they want and need.”
Read more at the Gerontology Institute Blog.