Nephew for a day

Intergenerational learning activities

Together with our volunteers, we run the activity “Nephew for a day” in order to integrate the elderly in the home “A New Chance” in the local community.

The idea was born before COVID and aimed to support our grandparents in the residential center and to create connections that would simplify their old age, because “who does not have grandparents, to look for in the Home” A New Chance “Marasesti.

It has become a tradition for the students of the 3 general schools in the city of Marasesti to come and spend the afternoons with the 33 grandparents in the residence center.

Our scope is to protect the inherited oral knowledge that forms the substratum of our collective identity that risks being lost. Therefore, the chosen way is to compare the generation of adults with that of the elderly, in appropriate contexts so as to achieve the transfer of knowledge.

The transfer and preservation of culture expressed by the elderly helped us to define the following:

• Type of culture: what older people think they have to give to the new generations;
• How: with the help of biography, of stories about themselves, about the past, because memories have the ability to reactivate:
• Positive mutual recognition: seniors-young people.
• A positive awareness (for seniors it could be the perception that they have a role, for adults it could be the connection with their past, with the local identity to which they belong).
• Reconstructing, recognizing or simply “bringing to light” a sense of collective identity.
• The type of knowledge transfer contexts (the framework and conditions in which it can be fully evaluated).

Organizer: Asociatia Voluntariat Pentru Viata

Location: Marasesti, Romania

Date: 15 August 2021