New Storytelling Project Teams the Young and Old
10/17/2008
Boys and Girls Club and People with Memory Loss to tell their stories.
Beginning November 2008, the TimeSlips national office teams up the Milwaukee Boys and Girls Club students of St. John Antida on a pilot project to facilitate storytelling with fellow students, healthy older adults, and older adults with memory loss.
In March 2009, the St. Joan Antida students will present the stories they gathered at Milwaukee’s historic Central Library. The March celebration aims to raise awareness of the power of story to express who we are and to strengthen family and community bonds.
TimeSlips stories capture the hopes, dreams, regrets, fears, humor, and desires of the storytellers. The method is particularly powerful for people with memory loss by nurturing creative communication and helping them connect with staff, family, and friends.
The hope for this project is to help students better understand memory loss, engage in a meaningful service-learning project while also educating the community about memory loss, and how TimeSlips—and storytelling—offers a bridge between generations and abilities. Additionally, TimeSlips aims to offer an ongoing storytelling meeting in the libraries as a way to support families caring for loved ones with memory loss at home.
TimeSlips was developed in 1998 by Anne Basting (PhD); groups across the world now use TimeSlips to generate stories, produce plays and art exhibits, and to rekindle hope for human connection among people struggling with dementia. To learn more about the program, become a trained facilitator or see the stories for yourself, visit www.timeslips.org.
www.timeslips.org
