Founder Of Sudbury's Bridges Together Featured In National Mag

SUDBURY, MA—A Sudbury nonprofit and charity that helps youths and seniors is getting national recognition as it was recently featured in a national magazine.

The founder of Bridges Together was in the spotlight as Authority Magazine featured a Q&A with Andrea J. Fonte Weaver this month.

Weaver, the founder and executive director of Bridges Together, developed the program in 1991, when the Sudbury Senior Center received a grant from the Sudbury Foundation to hire her to begin designing, implementing and evaluating intergenerational programs. Bridges is now used in schools across the country.

"Bridges Together is an internationally-recognized organization building awareness for the need of intentional intergenerational engagement between young and old members of our society," Fonte told Patch. "We provide a suite of award-winning tools and training programs used by individuals, schools, senior centers, communities, and companies. When multigenerations connect in meaningful ways, it improves the physical, social-emotional, cognitive and even economic health of everyone involved. Strong intergenerational programs, such as the Bridges Program Curricula Suite, are a vaccination against ageism and a prescription for longevity. We just published a white paper synthesizing the research behind the benefits of intergenerational engagement."

Weaver said she was inspired to start the program when her own extended family showed the importances of helping one another and learning from one another, sharing life's ups and downs together. In college, she learned about the field of intergenerational studies and got excited about being able to combine her love for children and older adults into one career.

After getting the program going, it "launched her career," which has included award-winning programs and initiatives. Since, Weaver has earned an MA in intergenerational studies and received multiple professional certifications.

"The best part of my work is hearing from the youth, the elders the staff and teachers whose lives are changed because of the tools we've developed and the training we've delivered," she said. "We need more people to understand why purposeful intergenerational engagement is so critical and why it needs to be an approach to solving problems. We are trying to help people understand the myriad of benefits of uniting generations on the individuals, sponsoring organizations and the ripple effects in communities and the world. Our hope is that everyone reading this article will think about this lens and find ways to unite generations in mindful and purposeful ways. I am but a messenger in this movement to return our communities to being age-integrated places of rich, inspiring and powerful interdependence."

Know someone making a difference in your town? Email us a little about them and how they're making a difference and we may profile them. Email charlene.arsenault@Patch.com.

Photo submitted