NEW YORK: Paint Pals, an intergenerational art project developed by Alive! in 2011, connects South West skilled nursing homes with local schools to provide residents and children with the chance to share interests and memories through painted postcards.
The project started five years ago when art workshop leader Deborah Feiler became inspired to find a way of encouraging communication between older people and young children and ‘remembered the excitement of receiving a letter from a pen friend as a child’.
Since then “Paint Pals has been created to find a meaningful way of breaking down intergenerational barriers between skilled nursing homes and their local communities – a way which would benefit and nourish the well-being of both older people living in care and children in local schools,” said Isobel Jones, project coordinator at Alive!