Creative Aging Says: Never Grow Old

A Memphis organization reaches out to thousands of seniors with special events and projects that keep them young at heart.

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The premise behind Creative Aging is that music and art never stop having a deep impact on people’s lives — but access for seniors is often limited.

“As people age, sometimes it becomes difficult for them to get to the music and the art,” says Mia Henley, executive director of the nonprofit. “So why not bring the music and the art to the senior?”

Creative Aging was founded in 2003 by Meryl Klein with the idea of bringing art and music to the places where seniors live and gather. There were only five artists and senior communities at the start, but the organization’s 2021 annual report says it has grown to more than 115 active, professional artists on its roster who bring music and arts experiences to 70-plus senior communities plus dozens of other community locations in the greater Memphis area. Those include adult daycare communities, nursing homes, assisted living communities, and independent living communities.

Memphis: How do you get the artists and performers hooked up with the seniors?

Mia Henley: The way Creative Aging works is the senior communities tell us what they want. We have a roster of about a hundred artists on our website and a senior community liaison can look there and say, ‘We’d like to have a blues performance or R&B or we want the opera. Or, we want Tennessee Shakespeare, or we want some musicians from Iris.’ Whatever they’re interested in, we are very likely to have it, and if we don’t, we’ll find it and organize it.

All of our artists are paid, and that is a really important part of our model. We don’t ask any artist at any time to volunteer their time. That’s an important part of how the money that flows into Creative Aging to support our organization is really flowing, for the most part, right back out to the arts community, to musicians and artists.

“What the science has shown is that seniors who engage with music and the arts on a regular basis are less likely to be hospitalized, take fewer prescription medications, have fewer falls, and suffer less from depression and the difficulties that are related to isolation.” — Mia Henley

In 2016, Creative Aging decided to expand. We added a second program — the Senior Arts Series — designed to work with older adults who were living in their own homes. We partnered with Theatre Memphis, which is centrally located, holds 400 people, and is ADA accessible. It’s a wonderful place for people to come. As people age, it sometimes becomes difficult for them to drive at night. People get overwhelmed by the notion of parking at a big complex, and the price of tickets becomes a burden.

What we’ve tried to do with the Senior Arts Series is remove all those barriers to accessing theater and have it in an accessible location at an accessible time for an accessible price. So for $5, people can come to Theatre Memphis during the day and we have free parking, free refreshments afterward, and they see the most wonderful talent. In the past season, for example, we had a string quartet from the Memphis Symphony Orchestra perform. We had Opera Memphis do a performance. Playhouse on the Square was doing Smokey Joe’s Cafe at their location and they brought their actors to Theatre Memphis to perform — a wonderful example of collaboration.

In 2019, you started Senior Studio. Tell us about that.

We offer about 20 different courses in some 15 arts disciplines, usually six to eight hours in length, running from four to six weeks. Seniors come every week and learn new skills. They are building on those skills each week in such areas as printmaking, landscape painting, how to play the dulcimer, how to create pottery, and so on. We have many options and people sign up for these courses and they’re free. We offer these courses both within senior communities and at public locations like Memphis public libraries — we work with all 18 branches. We also work with The Dixon Gallery and Gardens and Memphis Brooks Museum of Art to offer classes at those places. We’d love to have more locations. We had a pottery class at the Dixon in June, and there were 76 people on the waiting list for only 10 spots. So, we are really looking for more places to offer classes like this because within the senior community, there’s so much interest and there’s so much demand for the senior studio courses.

Senior Studio is important not only because people learn about the arts and build skills, but it also offers opportunity for community connection. One of the things that seniors combat is isolation. The pandemic was a time when isolation was an issue for everyone, but maybe more for seniors because of Covid-related restrictions and health precautions.

Talk more about the benefits to the seniors as well as the community.

What the science has shown is that seniors who engage with music and the arts on a regular basis are less likely to be hospitalized, take fewer prescription medications, have fewer falls, and suffer less from depression and the difficulties that are related to isolation. A recent study by the AARP found that the effects of isolation can be just as great as other major diseases like heart disease. The impact that that can have on a person’s health is tremendous.

What we find with Senior Studio courses in particular, but with really any type of arts engagement, is that it allows seniors to be a part of the community. There are lots of ways to stay engaged in community, but clearly music, musical performances, and arts workshops are among those ways. A lot of older adults didn’t experience the arts in their younger days, maybe because they were working full time, or they were raising families. Maybe they didn’t have the financial resources. Maybe the arts just weren’t near where they lived or worked. What we’re trying to do is give people the opportunity to do something. Maybe they have a lot of experience in it, or they may have none.

Your programs are free or involve a minimal charge. Where do you get funding?

We are supported by the City of Memphis, Shelby County government, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, ArtsMemphis, the Durham Foundation, the Community Foundation of Greater Memphis, and individual donors. We also have some earned income. We have an online fundraiser every year in September. We get gifts from $5 to $5,000 during that. The senior communities themselves that have funding for arts and entertainment also pay a membership fee for the events that they have at their communities. And we have a number of senior communities who have no funding to contribute and their events are covered by grant funding.

There are 135,000 people in Shelby County over age 65, give or take. The Tennessee Commission on Aging and Disability, which keeps up with this data county by county, estimates that there’ll be about 165,000 people over 65 in Shelby County by 2030, which isn’t that far from now. We are not reaching all of them. We estimate that we touch seniors about 30,000 times a year. We are not coming close to reaching everyone that could be impacted in a very positive way by the work we do.

I know with 135,000 people out there, there are thousands and thousands that we are not reaching. We are grateful for the generous grants that we do get, but if we had more funding, we would be able to reach further into the senior communities that we serve. And we would be able to expand the number of communities that we serve. There are places we are not reaching at all and there are places that we are reaching six times a year, but we could be reaching them 20 times a year.

I don’t think it’s over the top to suggest that people have musical performances in their community once a month. And I really don’t think it’s over the top to say twice a month, or that they have a workshop once a quarter. We don’t have the funding for that to happen yet, so that is a goal.

There are senior communities that host musical performances once a week and workshops on a regular basis, but there are lots of places where that’s not happening. There are high-rise towers that we serve that have up to 400 people and we are getting there only six times a year. That doesn’t sit well with me. Those 400 people with an average income well below the poverty level could be impacted more frequently. And the same is true in communities of all kinds all across the city.

You have to wrangle multiple artists, multiple venues, and multiple events throughout the year. How do you keep it together?

We are grateful for technology that helps with a lot of the scheduling and the coordination efforts that we have, but make no mistake — it is a people business and we are deeply invested in our artists who are really important stakeholders in our organization. They love what they do. They report back to me after every event and there are about a thousand events a year. So, they report back because that’s how they send an invoice and they help us keep up with statistics, like how many people were there. And they tell us the stories of what happens in their class or performance. It really helps us let people understand the impact of what’s happening.

We are also indebted to our stakeholders that operate the senior communities, whether they’re in housing towers or senior centers or private residences, as they do the same thing: They let us know how many people came and if the seniors were engaged. The independent seniors who take the classes report back about what the learned and did. They’ll say, “I can’t believe I can act. I never thought I would be able to sculpt. I’m a great printmaker.” Comments like that let us know how the arts are really touching their lives.

Our staff consists of me as executive director, a full-time director of programs, and a scheduling and administrative coordinator, which is a part-time job. So, we are two-and-a-half-employees and over a hundred people with whom we contract to perform and teach for us.

How can someone get involved?

Go to our website, where you add your name to our email, which will give you a notification every time we have a new show coming up or a new set of classes being offered. Generally, we send an email out once a month to let people know of classes and events.