Encouraging our fellows

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Adopt a Saba, Israel

Israel

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Vision

To become a nation-wide model for intergenerational care, recognized by the professional welfare community as an effective apparatus for dealing with individual elderly loneliness in society.

Eventually every campus in Israel will have the ‘Adopt a Saba’ project.

Activity

Adopt a Saba serves and links the unfulfilled needs of two populations: elderly people in need of interpersonal relationship and students who are interested in social action and community service. The focus of the project is on the weekly meetings – students meet on a weekly basis with their assigned elderly man or woman and provide company to alleviate some of their loneliness. During the visits, we encourage the students to carry out a variety of activities such as helping the elderly person in using the computer and the internet, recording life stories, taking a walk, engaging in conversations or activities in the areas of music, culture, and the arts, thus, producing a special and personal relationship between the student and the elderly person.

The project seeks:

  1. To alleviate the problem of loneliness and despair in the elderly population through the weekly student visits and to strengthen the intergenerational relationships between these two age groups.
  2. To enhance the students’ understanding of this silent segment of the population and to be enriched by the experience and the exposure to it.

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