ASU connects younger, older generations to ease loneliness

When Pencie Culiver sits down on a bench every Tuesday outside Coor Hall, the students are drawn to her and her big sign that says, “I’m All Ears.”

She soothes their sorrows, delights in their joys and sometimes gently guides them to the answers they seek.

She listens.

Culiver is part of a new initiative at Arizona State University called the Friendship Bench, meant to encourage younger and older folks to just sit and talk to each other — about anything.

“I find it energizing, and I feel like I’m helping them,” said Culiver, who is a resident of Mirabella at ASU, the high-rise retirement community on the Tempe campus.

“One girl told me, ‘I’ve only been here 15 minutes, but I feel so much better.’

“I think there are kids who are lonely and don’t have anybody to talk to. They feel like they’re talking to their grandma.”

The Friendship Bench is just one way that ASU has been building connections across generations, to the benefit of everyone. Other ways are:

• The Next Generation Service Corps, which has some of its student members work alongside older adults as part of the Co-Generational Mission Team, addressing social issues together.
• The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, which is open to anyone age 50 or older, frequently offers intergenerational opportunities. For example, in February, the program is offering a fused-glass workshop over two Saturdays for ASU students and OLLI participants, led by an ASU art student.
• The Mirabella at ASU Pen Pal Exchange, in which any student at ASU can connect with an older adult by filling out this form. Students will be matched with a Mirabella resident, who will make the first outreach to introduce themselves. Like the Friendship Bench, the exchanges can be about anything and lead to lasting friendships.

ASU Chief Wellness Officer Judith Karshmer said that one of her biggest focus areas is connection and belonging.

“We know that one thing that happens, and was exacerbated during COVID, was that our students are feeling isolated,” said Karshmer, who also is dean of the Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation.

“The Friendship Bench is a really important thing that says to the community that being able to have a connection with somebody and feeling that you belong on campus is part of your well-being.”

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy came to ASU in 2023 on his “We Are Made to Connect” nationwide tour to talk about the “loneliness epidemic” among college students and the importance of interaction.

“Loneliness has real consequences for our health,” he told the ASU crowd, citing increases in the risk for depression, anxiety, physical illness, dementia and suicide.

The ASU Friendship Bench program started in the fall semester with about a dozen residents of Mirabella, who attended training before deploying to spots on campus. The program is led by Aaron Guest, a gerontologist and an inaugural assistant professor of aging at the Center for Innovation in Healthy and Resilient Aging in the Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation.

“Many students are not around older adults. It's very easy on a campus to become age segregated and forget there's a world around us,” he said.

“This provides an opportunity for students to have a listening ear to process things that they're going through, but also to meet someone from another generation and to engage with them.”

Intergeneration connection helps everyone, Guest said.

“From my viewpoint, we know that intergenerational connections have a host of benefits, particularly from my interest around reducing ageism and increasing of generational collaboration,” he said.

“And we know the way that happens is through exposure to older adults.”

Frank Infurna, a professor of developmental psychology at ASU, said that research shows that volunteering can help older adults.

“We saw that people who were steadily volunteering, but also who started volunteering, were less likely to report or to exhibit cognitive impairments long term with this socialization and engagement,” he said.

One of the most common ways to interact across generations is in the classrooms of ASU. In the fall semester, more than 11,800 ASU students were age 40 or older, making up about 8% of all students online and on campus. About 500 students who attended in person on one of ASU’s campuses in the fall were age 50 or older.

Some courses are designed specifically for intergenerational connection, such as "Stress Management Tools," a three-credit class offered by the School of Social Work last year to undergraduates and members of OLLI.

In the fall semester, the Humanities Lab course "Educating for Democracy" had 18 students who ranged from a first-year undergraduate to an 80-year-old.

Cielo Monge, a mechanical engineering major, told ASU News, “It’s been great to be surrounded by older people. I have learned a lot from them when it comes to vocabulary, their projects, how they write.”

The Next Generation Service Corps is a leadership program in the Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions. Students in any major can participate in the corps, which divides students into mission teams to complete service projects.

Kaithlyn Nathan, a senior majoring in early childhood education, leads the Co-Generational Mission Team, which includes 15 ASU students and four residents from Mirabella. Together, they researched generational issues to come up with a mission plan.

“This year we're focusing on co-generational connections. We learned that there tends to be a lot of negative stereotypes (between) generations,” Nathan said.

“We wanted to understand why these stereotypes are put in place and what we can do to help push that bias away so that as a society we can grow and learn to work and connect with one another.”

The team started a pen-pal project with students at Catalina Ventura School in Phoenix. The children learn to write letters, and the Mirabella residents can share their life experiences. For example, the seventh graders are growing a garden and one of the older pen pals shared some recipes for the harvest.

In early December, the Co-Generational Mission Team met at Mirabella for a holiday party and to make cards for other residents.

Bill Gates, a retired newspaper editor and resident of Mirabella, said that bringing generations together is important.

“There’s a lot of misinformation about what older people are like and what college students are like,” he said.

“You hear about how lazy Gen Z is, and every single student I’ve talked to is taking a huge load and working two jobs. I’m totally impressed.

“And I think it’s good for students to see some old people who are not so calcified that they can’t grapple with new ideas — as long as it doesn’t involve WhatsApp,” he joked.

Like many Mirabella residents, Gates and his wife moved to Mirabella because they wanted to take classes and interact with young adults.

“I’ve formed some good friendships. Some have graduated and we still keep in touch,” he said.

The Friendship Bench program is based on a similar initiative that started in Zimbabwe years ago.

Guest will be collecting data on the program and hopes to expand it to other ASU campuses.

“We’ll know what students are talking about and the challenges they're facing, from just wanting someone to talk to, to getting a second opinion, to ‘I don't have anyone to spend my birthday with.’

“We won’t know private details, just things like, ‘I spoke to a student about their class’ or ‘I referred a student to this service.’"

He’ll also be assessing how the older adult mentors feel about the program and being integrated on campus.

Culiver, who graduated with a degree in art from ASU in 1966, decided to try the Friendship Bench and took the training, which consisted of several video modules designed to equip the volunteers with resources to pass along to students. She volunteers for about 90 minutes every Tuesday.

Her first day, she picked out a bench on the campus and 12 students stopped by to talk to her.

“Mainly, they were curious,” she said. “It was, ‘Are you going to be here next week?’ ‘Did you go to ASU?’ ‘How long have you been married?’”

Typically, seven or eight would stop by. One week no one stopped.

“I tend to have 90% guys and 10% girls, and every single guy talks about his girlfriend and says, ‘What should I do?’”

It usually takes a few minutes for the students to get to the point.

“They all say, ‘What’s the best thing that ever happened to you in your life?’ They want to get to know me and then go into the reason they’re there.

“When I tell them I’ve been married 60 years, that opens the door.”