Instead of waterparks and beach vacations with their friends, some Atlanta teens are spending part of their summer with residents four or five times their age.
Generation Connect is a week-long summer camp for high schoolers during which they pair up with an elderly “buddy” at the A.G. Rhodes nursing home and partake in workshops, field trips, social activities, and an oral history project.
The partnership between A.G. Rhodes Community Wellness Care and Pebble Tossers, a greater Atlanta-based nonprofit youth volunteer organization, aims to combat loneliness in the elderly and help teens learn empathy and service.
“It’s all about bridging that commonality between the generations, right? We’re all more alike than we think,” said Kim Beasley, the Director of Communications and Outreach at A.G. Rhodes.
On the first day of the camp, teens undergo a dementia simulator to help them understand what some elderly individuals go through. Additionally, the high schoolers are trained on the “Eden Alternative,” a philosophy that A.G. Rhodes adopts in the care of their residents.
“It is a person-centered, person-directed model of care,” Beasley said. It focuses on the individual’s preferences, wants, and needs to help combat loneliness, helplessness, and boredom for the elderly.
“[The Eden Alternative] talks a lot about ageism, which is a really cool thing to do with the teenagers, because that works both ways,” Beasley said. “So [the teens and the elderly] get in some really neat conversations about, ‘well, people assume that because I’m old, I can’t do this.’ And then [the teens will] say, ‘well, people assume because I’m young, I can’t do this.’”
The first Generation Connect was held in 2017, but it spanned the entire summer. In 2018, the camp was shortened to one week to help maintain focus and strengthen relationships. Around 10 to 12 high schoolers are selected to participate in the camp each year.
Through Generation Connect, high school students can earn service hours for graduation, learn about new career paths in social work, and hear personal stories from the elderly. The oral history project was the original heart of the camp initiative. The teens work with their buddy to extract their life story and tell it in a new way, and both parties are invited to reflect on the experience.
“Another really cool component of camp is that the campers are meeting students from other parts of Metro Atlanta that they wouldn’t otherwise meet,” said Alysha Alimohamed, the Program Manager at Pebble Tossers. The organization covers areas as far north as Cherokee and Hall and as far south as Fulton and Clayton.
One of Beasley’s favorite memories from Generation Connect came from its first official iteration in 2018. A teenage boy was matched with an elderly woman, and Beasley wasn’t expecting a deep friendship due to their genders. At one point during the week, the two were unaccounted for. Turns out, “They were up in her room watching the ‘Terminator,’ because they both loved action movies,” Beasley said, laughing. “The kids matched with their buddies in ways that you wouldn’t always expect.”
A.G. Rhodes and Pebble Tossers are looking forward to the 2026 Generation Connect July 13-17. Alimohamed said, “We as staff enjoy it. The elders enjoy it, the campers enjoy it. It’s just a really fun camp.”
Find out more about Generation Connect and sign up here.
