A Community Room Can Help Your Population Age Gracefully

Buildings with community rooms have a prime location to set up activities that can help relieve the isolation that comes with aging – social clubs, exercise sessions, card games and book clubs. Such rooms are usually found in larger complexes like Penn South, the 2,820-apartment limited-equity co-op in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. Still, boards in smaller buildings may want to look into converting unused basement spaces or portions of health clubs into community rooms.

For instance, Clearview Gardens, a Queens co-op with 1,788 garden apartments, has a book club that meets once a week in the community room, says board member Bonnie Honya. She is also one of three board members running a separate, roughly 20-year-old nonprofit corporation, the Clearview Assistance Program, which helps the co-op’s seniors in myriad ways. “We have a men’s group that meets on Tuesdays,” she says, “and a women’s group on Friday mornings – about 30 women come to that. We serve bagels and coffee and a social worker runs the group. It really works.”

Socialization is key, says Albert De Leon, former board president of 140 Eighth Avenue, a two-building, six-story co-op in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park neighborhood. “There are things that can be done” to intermingle generations and break up seniors’ potential isolation. “We have a holiday party and stoop sales that help bring residents together,” De Leon says. One big draw has been “a Halloween pumpkin-carving contest. That was huge – the kids loved it, and the adults loved it because there was hot toddy to go with it. It’s always nice seeing kids happy, and they got their parents and grandparents involved.”

One way to enhance attendance, he adds, is to note that, “if nothing else, it’s a great networking opportunity – you find out what people do, they find out what you do, who you know, who they know.”