This week, we did a debrief on the LBGTQ Community Center LEG. It was great to hear how it went, considering that several members of the cohort were unable to attend due to class conflicts. It sounds as if that LEG went much different than the others did because with the other LEGs that I was able to attend, there were several cohort members teamed up with one or two seniors. However, it sounds as if this one was reversed and it was one cohort member assigned to several seniors. We also did a debrief on one of the HAPs that has already taken place, and that was the gardening HAP at Potiker and I believe again at the West Center. It sounds as if their event was wildly successful and they were able to get several seniors to take part in potting succulents. The professors had mentioned that they will even try to implement this potting event into the Life Course Scholar program next year for the entire cohort to take part in. We continued with the entire cohort briefly sharing their debunking ageism communication assignments. I was impressed with the cohort’s work as there were several very unique ideas that people had in completing this assignment. Some students teamed up to create an Instagram account from the perspective of an active and fun senior. There was also a twitter account made to show that seniors can continue living exciting lives into their older years. There were a few blogs and even a bingo game! Some of these projects might be displayed at the Aging Symposium. My groups’s HAP is coming up on June 1st! Everything is coming together for this walkathon and we are very excited for the turnout that we will have.
Our intergenerational walkathon is two weeks away! We have about 35 people (outside of our group) signed up to attend this event that we were able to get by reaching out to existing senior walking groups in the community. We are hoping to work this week on getting more to come out! We had another site visit at the LGBT Community Center in Hillcrest this last week; however, I along with several of my other classmates, were unable to attend due to the timing of this site visit conflicting with our other classes. I was a little sad about this because the LGBT Community Center in Hillcrest was probably my favorite site to visit last quarter. In our next class, we will be presenting our debunking ageism communications assignment. I’m really excited to see all the different ideas that members of the cohort had in doing this assignment. I had settled on an informational booklet as my project; however, I know that a lot of people got very creative and had unique ideas such as creating social media accounts from the perspective of a senior! We will also be presenting a brief sketch up of our HAP posters that will be due later on in the quarter. Following our walkathon event, we will be sending out a post event survey for all the walkers so that we can obtain some quantitative results and data that we can use in completing our poster. We’ve already sent out our orders for t-shirts for the day of the event, that were thoughtfully designed by some members of our group. We are just counting down the days until the event!
This week, our debunking ageism communication assignment was due. I chose to narrow my topic on debunking ageism myths regarding the tech industry! While leading tech companies openly publicize their organizational diversity data in terms of ethnic and gender composition, little data has been shared about the age makeup of the tech workforce. However, Visier, a cloud-based analytic application designed to answer critical workforce strategy questions, published their findings from an aggregation of anonymized and standardized workforce databases to debunk ageism in tech myths, and I referred to the findings of their research for this assignment. I published the findings into a neat and portable booklet. I focused on debunking four myths: (1) older tech workers are valued less; (2) older tech workers experience a drop in salary; (3) newly hired older tech workers are not paid equitably; and (4) older workers in tech resign at higher rates. Visier provided analytic proof to debunk all four myths, and I published the data in my booklet to support my findings. Yet despite these findings that older workers in tech are increasingly rated as top performers as they age compared to non-tech workers, there is systemic ageism in tech hiring practices. Tech hires a higher proportion of younger workers and a smaller proportion of older workers than non-tech. I included in my booklet some suggestions of important steps that employers can take to ensure they root out the risk of ageism in their workforce, and acquire the best and brightest talent available, regardless of age. One of these steps is keeping in mind that, as with ethnic and gender equity, age equity is a cultural issue — if pockets of ageism exist within your organization, you will need to devise plans to address them not only via better HR practice and policy rollouts, but through culture change. Another step would be to develop hiring practices that specifically do not screen out candidates based on the length of their unemployment — while this report focused on systemic ageism, many individual stories suggest older unemployed workers struggle to get hired, and studies indicate recruiters screen out candidates that have been unemployed for longer periods of time. Companies may be missing out if they don’t consider the age composition of specific teams, departments, and business units and how managers can build diversity. Legal issues aside, designing a recruitment strategy around younger generations can be shortsighted from a business perspective. Older workers tend to be more loyal, and an over- representation of millennials in the workforce can impact retention. My group is continuing to work on our intergenerational walkathon HAP, which will be taking place on June 1st. More updates to come!
This week, for our class site visit, we re-visited the Gary Mary West Center. We arrived with conversation cards to ask any people that were willing to stop by and chat with us. We walked around the center offering snacks to people in the building as an incentive to stop by and have intergenerational conversation with us! I ended up chatting with one woman for the entire duration of this visit. She said she was born and raised in Mexi-Cali, but that now she lives with her daughter in Chula Vista. She told me her daughter is unaware of the fact that she visits the West Center because she chooses to quietly slip out and take the bus to get there while her daughter is out at work. She said it takes her over an hour to get there via bus, and she chooses not to let her daughter know about this because she doesn’t want to seem like a burden on her, which is a common theme among elders living with their family that we have discussed in class. Once she realized that I am Indian, she got very excited and let me know that India is a country that she’s always wanted to visit because she loves the food and the culture so much. I feel like I bonded more so with this woman than I have with any other individual from any other site visit. I’ve been going through some personal things lately, that I haven’t had the courage to share with any other friends. But there is something oddly therapeutic about venting to strangers. Once I opened up to her about these things, she felt comfortable enough to share with me some personal things that she’s been suffering through lately. She enjoyed conversation with me very much as well, I believe that we both talked with one another for two hours! We were the last two people left still engaging in conversation by the end of inter-generational conversation, and I felt bad that I had to cut off our talk so that I could drive my carpool back to campus. She told me she was grateful for our talk and I packed her a few granola bars to take with her. This was an experience that truly moved me, and I hope to have similar experiences at our future site visits!
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Tanveer MoundiWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
June 2019
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