Students to Seniors Volunteering Training

1. Intro: Hello and thank you so much for joining her create circles training. 2. Create Circles Training: Hello and thank you so much for joining our create circles training. We know that it is absolutely crucial to support or older adults. And we're so grateful that individuals like you are so motivated to be a part of this greater support circle for older adults. In this training, we'll be talking about many topics and will provide a bunch of resources so that you'll have everything that you could possibly need in order to have the most meaningful and engaging experiences possible. We will focus on multiple, multiple things. And so it is perfectly okay to take your time with the training and really tried to digest as much of the information as possible. In our training, we will not only make sure to emphasize what you should be doing, but why. A lot of times this greater sense of why makes the entire interaction so much more meaningful as well as just makes so much of it so intuitive. And so we're excited to jump into it. Before we go into the nitty-gritty, we wanted to help contextualize a lot of this work. We think it's so important to really understand these interactions as just a way to engage with older adults, but really understand all of the different factors at play here. And how Bye. Actually looking and considering everything, we're able to not just address a single problem, but maybe alleviate a lot of the different components that may be applying additional pressure on our older adults are things that they may be worried about. In our lives. We focus on our health a lot. We tried to exercise, we try to eat well, we try to avoid unhealthy habits. We try to live longer and better lives. And the reality is, we've been able to do this. The life expectancy of Americans has increased significantly over the past 5000 years. However, the way that we look at these later years of our lives haven't really changed. So that means that we're using these archaic models in order to control and dictate what are older, don't should be doing. And so that's why many times, even whenever they're able to do certain things, it's because of aging stigma that many times they don't really keep themselves as engaged as possible. And so we're really looking to provide this autonomy to older adults and make them feel like mentors and really help lead our future generations because they honestly have the most experience. Here we see some statistics and while we know that not everyone may be working with an older adult in a nursing home or in a long-term care community. We wanted to kind of just provide some general statistics that older adults may face and some that are quite specific to long-term care. For example, did you know that 33 percent of older adults feel lonely every single day? Did you know that over 40 percent of older adults and nursing homes have depression? Did you know that over 60 percent of nursing home residents are fewer than two visitors every single year. These numbers are staggering. But the reality is if we're able to better connect with their older adults and really make them feel like they're a part of our community again. We can address all of these things. So at create circles, we're really focused on trying to address as many challenges around long-term care, around aging that may come with a lot of these psychosocial components as possible. Let's systematically go through some of these challenges. Here we have loneliness and social isolation. Loneliness and social isolation are not necessarily the same thing. Loneliness is that physical feeling that you feel like there's no one to talk to your non-related to you or just the feeling of being alone? Well, social isolation is actually not having anyone around you to talk to. Both of these challenges have similar health outcomes because loneliness and social isolation both increase our mortality by around 27 percent. And that is staggering. It's been shown that these social determinants of health. So our ability to have social support and a huge part of social support is just having someone to talk to. And that someone that we really trust dictate 80 percent of health outcomes. If we're able to actually address loneliness and social ways, social isolation at its core, we can make a huge difference. But sometimes it's not that simple. Many times, the most logical approach for loneliness and social isolation is 0. Let's just give them someone to talk to or provide an ear to really listen to them. But the challenge with this is if we are trying to just provide these interactions a couple hours a week, then though our older adults are the individuals that we're working with, they'll feel good for those couple hours. But what about all of the other hours in the week? And so this solution is not necessarily fully addressing the entire issue. The next challenge is a lack of purpose. A lack of purpose is one of those things that we don't really think about until it's gone. For example, as students, we have something that's constantly pushing us forward. Whether it's a career that we want or dreams that we want to aspire to reach. And all of these different things that push us to get out of bed in the morning. However, as individuals age many times due to an array of challenges, they lose the sense of purpose and whenever someone's are no long-term care community where by this point they've lost many family members. They've lost the ability to exit the building whenever they want. They've lost the ability to drive, the ability to cook. They've lost so many things dear to them and their identity that it's very easy to feel like they've lost a sense of purpose. We really want to look to address this sense of purpose and provide them a chance to show them how valuable really validate a lot of the feelings that they are having. And maybe possibly even help create the sense of purpose by actually addressing the root of their challenges. The next thing that we talk about on this challenges list. Is cognitive decay. And while cognitive decay is many times considered to be a genetic component of aging, this is not necessarily true. There are many types of memory that actually gets stronger as we age. Things like our ability to know information, no facts actually increases with age. Cognitive decay, especially for older adults, is actually less due to genetic components unless if it's in a particular chronic conditions like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. And a lot of times due to a lack of stimuli. For example, if someone was typically just sitting in the same old share every single day for months on end. It doesn't matter if they're 85 or 15, there will be a level of cognitive decay because our brain is really built off of connectivity. We rely on different types of stimuli really engaging us. And so we are looking to craft something around this cognitive decay that will actually engage older adults not only during the visit, but provide them things to think about, things for them to work on, even while the visits aren't going on. And our last challenge is really ageism and the stigma that comes with it. Well, many of us going through this training may be younger than the individuals that we're working with. It's really hard to understand the stigma that comes with aging Unless if we're the ones being the victims to the stigma, ageism is really one of those things that we are able to actually feel until we see it firsthand. Whenever we use derogatory terms towards older adults, or whenever we start questioning someone's abilities because of their age. Many times. This contributes to the stigma. Many times wherever you go up to an older adult and you're like, Hey, what if we make a movie together? A lot of them will initially be like, Oh no, no, my time for that has passed. And a lot of that is based off of the stigma and all of these stereotypes around what aging should look like. With all of these challenges in mind, we want to really focus on our mission of create circles, which is to really redefine aging by bringing purpose to our older adults. And for able to bring purpose and engage them on a sense that is really on their own terms. Then we can actually completely changed the view of aging in their own eyes and our societies eyes and NRI's as people that will be interacting with them. So we're going to start off by discussing our general mindset and approach to these visits. Just to give you an idea of what things should be. Maybe going through your head as you're starting to have your visits with an older adult as well. So we know, of course, that the quick solution to somebody feeling lonely would be to provide them with companionship. But unfortunately, the reality is that we can't provide this companionship 2047 and constantly be with the older adult that were assigned to. For example, these visits are probably just taking up maybe an hour of somebody's week, but we need to make sure that it's extending beyond just that one hour. And so the way that we're trying to do that is by focusing on conversations and projects with the older adult that will help to make them feel engaged even when they're on their own. The general idea is that we're not saving these older adults, which is a really common trap that is easy to fall into. But rather we're learning from them. And that these experiences and stories that we're getting from the older adults are just as valuable. And it's a really mutualistic, two-way, a reciprocal relationship between the older adult and between the volunteer. So what kinds of things can you as a volunteer expect to gain from working with create circles? So first off, a big one is communication skills. It's definitely challenging at first, and it can be intimidating to have conversations with somebody that you've never met before. You may not have that much on paper in common with. But I think it's really rewarding to see how you're able to build a relationship. And communication skills are a really big part of that. And in addition, soft skills like empathy, compassion for another person, situation are also things that can come out of this human. I realized that even though you've never been in a similar situation to this other person, you're still learning how to better support them and be there for them and make them feel, heard and listened to and validated. And these are all things that are training materials are meant to help you feel more comfortable with before you go into a conversation with somebody else. Like I mentioned earlier, this is also a really unique opportunity to form meaningful relationships with someone that you might not otherwise have been able to get close to and bridged the sort of gaps that exist within our society currently between different generations. Because chances are right now, you maybe don't have that many people who are classified as older adults are over a certain age in your life that you can talk to frequently. And it might surprise you what kinds of things you're able to gain from these relationships. So on our end, what do we expect from you as a volunteer? So one thing that's going to be really, really, really important for these older adults and for the staff at the facilities is to keep our volunteers visits very consistent and make sure that our volunteers are really committed to what they're doing. So consistency is really key. And it's really unfair and challenging for the older adults and the facilities to accommodate. If we as volunteers dropped the ball or are unable to do these visits, do them at the same time, same day of the week that we committed to doing them originally. So it's really important that if any issues come up with your scheduling, you are really proactive in letting us know and letting your facility no, and letting go. You're older adult now. And that these things are really dealt with as soon as possible. Because we really just want to stick to the same schedule. As much as weekend unless there's a true emergency that comes up. The framework that we have set up is eight weeks of visit is what you're committing to at first. And if you would like to build on that with more week sort of chunks, then of course, that's definitely welcome. But eight weeks and then two visits per week for at least 30 minutes. And if the visits go longer than that and you and the person that you're assigned to both have the time, then that's really great. There's no real cat or a maximum amount of time that you should be having these conversations for. If you do absolutely need to miss a visit. We have the allowance for up to three in an eight week period. Whether or not there are, quote, unquote excused or you're letting us know ahead of time. But you should always be communicating with us and let your older adult now before the visit happens. So if you do need to miss visit, then try to reschedule and figure out that on your end. And unfortunately, if you do go above the three missed visits with them that period, then we would need to have a conversation about revisiting your status as a volunteer. Another thing that's really important, I visit nodes. These are the forms that you'll fill out online after your visit happens. And they're really important for us in order to know how we can better be supporting or volunteers. Better be communicating with staff at facilities and resolving issues that seem to be coming up. It's really important that you be as thorough as possible. Keep these notes as complete as possible and include as much detail as you're comfortable including. So an example of what this could look like is here. And this is a really great example of a visit note because it's very thorough, really gives us a good idea of what's happening in these conversations. It's almost as if you're leaving these visit notes so that somebody could come in and read them and would be able to pick up a conversation with your older adult. That's kind of the idea behind when you're writing these visit notes, how detailed they should be even if that's not actually what's going to happen. So I'll give you a little bit to read through this. One additional thing just to keep in mind is whenever you're asked to conduct any sort of survey with your older adult where both you and the older adult are interested in participating. These are just some general guidelines for how to go about making that happen. So first off, make sure you ask for permission and that the older adult isn't setting up for anything they're not comfortable doing. Really be clear about explaining what it is that you're going to be asking and explain the different steps of what you'll need. For example, saying, Do you mind if I ask you three questions about how our visits have been going? They'll be really brief and explaining also what these results are going to be used for. So saying, well, these results are just going to go to the create circles team and will help us improve our visits and make sure that these visits are helping both of us. And it's really important to speak slowly and neutrally when you're explaining the survey and answer any questions that come up for the older adult. And after you've completed the survey, thank them for participating. And then make sure that you record your answers online after the survey has been completed. The beginning of your visit is one of the most important times to make a great first impression. Well, there can be a lot of uncertainty when starting conversations. We know that following or three-step process really helps ensure that your older adult feels a genuine connection to you and helps you build that trust and rapport early so that the rest of your conversation can be a really deep, meaningful conversation. In this three-step process, our first step is enthusiasm. There's a significant dynamic that happens whenever you have an intergenerational connection with someone. And one thing that the younger person can bring, as always, energy. This positive energy is something that many of these people may not see in a nursing home particularly. And so by really embracing this side, it really allows the older adults to feel like while talking to this person really helps brighten my day. For this first step of enthusiasm. It's very important to do a few things. We recommend to a one smile while waving with an open palm facing the camera. The reason that we recommend these three things is because a smile, as you know, really helps break the ice. And open palm does a very subconscious thing of actually indicating transparency. Whenever you have an open palm wave or show your palms to anyone, it makes them feel like you have nothing to hide. And this is very important thing whenever you're interacting with an older adult who may have had a very diverse array of experiences in the past and could be skeptical of why someone would want to talk to them. And thirdly, the wave just helps break the ice further. Many times whenever you wave, it feels like you've known this person for years. And whenever you're meeting someone new in this small change can make a huge difference. Step two is complement. The reason that we have compliments so early is because it really helps build a greater sense of genuine connection whenever you're complimenting someone that forces you to actually think about them, think about decisions that they've made, whether it's their hair or the glasses that they're wearing, or the shirt that they put on. By explicitly pointing out these decisions that they've made, it almost validates them. It almost makes the older adult feel like, oh wow, someone's noticing even the small things on me or things that I'm saying. And the compliments don't have to stay physical. It can be within the conversation. If they talk about a specific memory, you can be like, wow, it's crazy that you have such an analytical thinking because you had this experience, but you're also thinking about all these things. And whenever someone feels like you're really paying attention, it makes all the difference. Thirdly, we recommend. Seeking advice. Whenever you speak to older adults, particularly in nursing homes, sometimes they may feel uncomfortable sharing information with you. And they don't want to necessarily be bombarded with a whole host of questions. Because it may seem like you're trying to pry some information out of them. The best way to combat this is to seek advice. One of the best ways that we push for seeking advice is by actually allowing them to talk and give some of their perspective on something happening in your life. For example, if you had a fight with a parent or with a friend, it would actually be a perfect opportunity for you to say that, oh, this week has been really tough because I had this fight with one of my best friends and this fight just keeps eating away at my mind. Do you have any advice on me on how I can make some amends on this and be able to focus on other things. And by being vulnerable in some sense and allowing them to now take their experiences and then give advice. It allows them to possibly even start opening a boat, opening up about their life. This could be in the way of them sharing about a time where they had a horrible fight and maybe that lead to losing touch with someone that they really cared about. And by asking questions about their advice, it can only allow you to strengthen this relationship if they say that, Oh, you should reach out to them and try to find a 10 minute talk on. You can maybe ask like more specific way is okay, should I try to do this at night or during the day? Should I try to find a time that works for them? Or should I try to do this as soon as possible? And by asking more follow-up questions, it only dives deeper into the conversation, which is a very important part of this. The irony of gratitude. One thing that is a very philosophical approach to this, but it's very true is that we all want to help the people around us and the older adults that were talking to. They also want to feel like they are helpful to us. The only ironic part is it's impossible for someone to know whether you are helping them or they are helping you without you actually explicitly expressing your gratitude. Therefore, we recommend very strongly and very consistently thanking them in specific ways for that they've helped you by giving specific complements. This really changes the way that they view, the way that they're able to help you. For example, if you say, oh thank you so much for talking to me today, then they'll feel like all of your interactions are simply about talking. But if you say, thank you so much for giving me advice on this part of my life. Or thank you so much for sharing this particular experience of yours. It actually helps me think about this other thing that I'm going through by actually sharing these very specific compliments, then they're also more committed and more connected to you. And so we strongly recommend expressing your gratitude multiple times during your visits. And while it may feel awkward or weird at first, it can be extremely powerful in the long run. When you begin to introduce new topics of conversation to your older adult, you want to try and to bring them up and natural organic way that feels intentional to the older adult. We don't want for those conversation topics to feel forced or like you're reading from a script. We want you to try to read things into the conversation based on previous visits and the current conversations that you're having. This might require you to do a little bit of preparation before visits. Reflect on what you've previously talked about, and try to have a few questions or topics of conversation in your head that you can bring up. If the older adult talks about something that they're interested in. For example, when bringing up a new topic of conversation or a completely random Lee seeming type of question. Instead of asking, would you rather live at the beach or mountains out of the blue? You could say something like the other day my friend and I were talking about this question and I really wanted to know what you thought about it. If you had to choose between living at the beach or in the mountains, which one would you pick and why? You might not really have had this conversation with your friend. That's okay. Making the older adult feel included in a bigger conversation and making them feel like you're thinking about them throughout the week is a great way to build rapport and make the older adult feel valued. As you build a relationship with your older adult, we want to make sure that the conversations you're having from week to week aren't repetitive, but do have continuity as you built the relationship. Don't have the same conversations every week about the same topics. That's boring for you in the older adult and feel stale. However, we do want you to build on your previous conversations each visit. A really easy way to do this is to remember specific topics that they were really interested in. Small details about their life and other things you've previously talked about. For example, this could be remembering a place that they lived when they were younger, where they went to high school or college. One of their favorite pets or a really funny story that they told you in one of their previous visits. Work to weave these details into your current conversation. For example, you could say, I remember a few weeks ago you mentioned that you once visited Paris. One of my friends is traveling there the summer. What places would you recommend she visits while she's traveling there? Doing something like this shows the older adult that you listen to them and it makes them feel valued. When they see that you care about and value their experience, they'll continue to share these memories and details about their life with you, which is ultimately what builds the relationship and makes us a meaningful and valuable experience for you. As you go through your visits with your older adult. We want you to be very intentional and the types of questions and comments that you asked her older adult, we want you to make your older adult feel valued and appreciated. This is done through your words and actions, including compliments and explicit displays and gratitude, as we talked about earlier. But we also want you to be very intentional and the way that you compromised your older adults and in the questions that you ask them, try to be really intentional about asking them questions about their current and future goals, not just what they've done in the past. They have lots of life experience that we can learn from, but they also have more life to experience. And we want to remind them of that. Just because they're older, doesn't mean that they don't have lots of things to look forward to. We also want to ask you to try to avoid asking them questions that hint at the assumption that they can't do things on their own. For example, don't assume that your older adult can't use technology. Don't say, Oh, you are able to get on Zoom all by herself. But so impressive that as a compliment and we do want you to complement your older adult. But comments like that might make your older adult feel that you assume that they can't do something like getting on technology just because of their age. We also want you to be mindful of making comments that stigmatize old age. Saying things like, oh, well you aren't that old. Insinuates that you think one day when they're even older than they are in today, that they won't be able to do things by themselves. Our organization is all about working to fight ageism. And part of that is realizing that growing old is a natural and necessary part of life that we shouldn't fear. As you have visits with your older adult, we expect that you and your older adult will be doing a lot of talking to get to know each other. And we often find the older adults love to share their experiences. But we also want to remind you that you shouldn't expect your older adult to do all the talking. If you're older adults seem slower to warm up and doesn't want to talk about themselves. Don't be afraid to be the one that talks first. Tell them about yourself, your interests, and your experiences. Be vulnerable in the sense that you are talking and opening up first, hearing more about you will encourage them to share more about themselves and their experiences as well. Of course, at the older adult is ready to share about themselves. Don't steal the show and make it all about you. The due, remember that the older adult wants to hear about YouTube and you shouldn't be afraid to just jump in and get this conversation going. We know that as potential on tiers, having conversations with older adults is one of the most exciting press about our program. While we hope that Conversations will be free-flowing and natural, here are just a few skills that may help guide the conversation along sometimes. First, and ability to pivot and switch topics can come in handy. For example, if you are working on a project and the topic of the conversation and shifts to something unrelated. And can be helpful to gently guide it back by saying something like, Hey, I love that story. But on another note, we still haven't answered one of the questions for the project and go from there. Positive body language is another skill that can come and use. If applicable. Virtual volunteering may vary from phone to video chat. But if you are on video chat. Try to mirror their actions generally by gauging how relaxed or comfortable they are and as much as possible make eye contact. Clear communication is very important for virtual volunteering. Speak slowly, clearly and as loudly as needed. Another tip is to compliment them whenever possible. You do not have to do this all the time, but it can be nice to voice your recognition of any awesome things if they share about themselves. For example, if they share a story that shows their bravery, it can be as simple as saying, Wow, that was so brave of you. And older adults, emotions may not be happy all the time, but no bad or what they feel. Make sure to validate them by saying things like, it makes a lot of sense why you feel this way. Active listening is a skill that can be very useful during virtual volunteering. Since you were not physically next to the older adult, body language and eye contact may not be enough to let them know that you're listening to them. First, asking open-ended questions helps them voice their opinions and stories in a way that they want and will probably let them give you a more in-depth response. For example, instead of did you get angry when that happened? You can ask, what did it feel like when that happened? Affirmation is a way of positively reinforcing their thoughts and feelings by saying something like, Hey, that's a great idea. I love where you're going with this. If you're working on a project together, reflection means sharing your perspective of what they are saying. This can be done by making observations such as EC, movie, feeling a certain way about this. Or I noticed you aren't too keen about this idea. It's okay if your observations are wrong, this allows them to correct you and go deeper into what they feel. Summarizing can help condensing long chunks of conversation and let them know what the main points you got from them. We're they give you a lot of information that one time you can say, okay, I just wanna go over what you said and repeat their main points. They can either confirm or correct weight they heard. Motivational interviewing is a more formal skill that you may or may not need to use. You may use this as you feel fit in your conversations, especially if you're older adult is feeling unusually down. This method strives to gain insight into how someone is feeling at the moment and what barriers prevent them from feeling better. Some example questions are, on a scale, one to 1010 being best and one being worse. How are you feeling today? Why do you feel blank? What is stopping you from doing blank? And how can I be most helpful? Helping recognize their own barriers can help them find a way around them. Strength-based approaches are ways to highlight the positive things you notice about your older adult as he had to know them better to help increase their motivation. You may say things like, I've noticed that you are very blank and that's really helpful because a blank, You seem like a insert good characteristic. That is something to be proud of. You mentioned you to blink and that's something special and tells me that you care. Feel free to change the phrases to fit your conversation. While volunteering with creates circles. There are few things that we ask you to refrain from doing while talking to your older adults do not be judgmental. Our goal is to form connections and focus on similarities. Do not cut them off while they're talking. Wait for them to finish their thoughts. In the case of an emergency, do not panic and instead remain calm and reach out for help immediately. Do not try to change their spiritual or religious beliefs. Do not make any medical recommendations or give any legal advice. Do not accept gifts, money, or any form of compensation, and please do not post pictures or media of you and your older adult on social media. If you do have pictures or videos that you would like to be shared, please contact us and we can talk about appropriate ways to do this. When it comes to conversations, it's important to try to talk about things that maybe someone hasn't had the chance to talk about in years. Ways that we recommend this are through to storytelling games. The first game is called Story ping-pong. Story ping-pong is built on this idea that our minds are constantly flowing from one idea to the other. And many times, only when we're forced to take note of it is whenever we start noticing this simple stories and we start understanding how someone actually things, the best way to explain this game is truly through example. And so the way this would work is that you would ask your older adult, Hey, I played this game with one of my friends as last week, I was wondering if we can play. It doesn't take too long, but it's a lot of fun. And if they say yes, at this point, you can explain the rules. The rules are that they have to simply speak and just follow their train of thought. And the hardest part of this game is that you cannot commit to a particular idea or a particular story, but rather you have to follow this train of thought. And so if the stories begin to change and one word leads to a different story, then you have to follow that. During this process of them speaking for approximately three to five minutes, you as a volunteer should be taking notes on what they say. And so one of the best ways to start this is to give them a primer word. So you can just speaking, starts speaking through a list of words, something like vacation, friend, movie. And as soon as they have a memory that is sparked by one of these words, they have to start talking about it. So say you say vacation and they start talking about a time that they went to Lake Tahoe. And the reason that they remember this is because they accidentally fell into the lake. And whenever they fell into the lake, at this point, they didn't know how to swim. And they'll continue down the story until one of those words leads to a different idea. And so maybe they say, didn't know how to swim. And whenever they say swim, they start thinking about this journey that they had after this experience of trying to learn how to swim. So they would go to the YMCA. Every single week for four hours and they practice their swimming. And this would practice reminds them of their job. And the reason it does that is because whenever they started their job in accounting, they were really bad at it. They had no idea what they were doing. But ultimately by practicing, they got better. And then possibly this leads them to a memory about the old boss that they had and maybe that leads to a relationship that they had with their parents. And this continues for a few minutes and once the time period allotted is over, at that point, you start going through these conversations, then you start asking, Hey, why do you think you made this connection to this thing? Or why do you think this led to this? Or why? Why do you think this was the memory that popped up instead of so many other memories that could have come with swimming or relationships and all of that. And it's a very powerful experience because they'll start thinking of memories that they just simply didn't even remember having. Um, we do this all the time as well. And if they're interested, you can do a very similar thing yourself. And by having this bidirectional approach, it really helps showcase how much deeper your conversations can truly be. So that story, ping-pong. The second game, is first-last best, worst. And with this, what you do is you create a table kind of like the one that you see in front of you. And you have these five columns where you have topics first-last, best, worst. And for each person you're older though in yourself, you should go through the topic and talk about and share a memory about the first vacation you had, the last vacation you had, the best vacation you had and the worst one. And the goal of this game is not to finish it as quickly as possible, but rather to really similar in these memory is really ask questions, get to know them, and have them dive deeper and deeper into these conversations. And whenever they do this, you'll notice that this opens a whole world of different conversations, home, world of experiences and your interactions will become instantly more meaningful. Hi everyone, welcome to the fourth and final module of the create circles fall into your training. I'm Sydney, and in this video we'll be going over projects which are one of the most unique and important aspects of our volunteer program and our volunteer support. Let's go ahead and get started. First, we're gonna talk about projects, which as I said, are incredibly important to our mindset and mission about helping older adults. The most important thing to remember about the projects that I'm going to be talking about and that you'll be working on with your older adult, is that there is really no set mold or ideal way to do a project. We know and understand that the experiences of our older adults and our volunteers are all incredibly unique. And we don't want to confine you to our own ideas. We want for the two of you to create something meaningful and stimulating. Something that both you and the older adult you're working with can be proud of. These projects are meant to engage the older adult and an activity that gives them a real sense of purpose and pride in the work that they do with you. One question that we get asked a lot is, when am I supposed to start project? Is there a certain number of visits that I should start or really, how do I know when to start a project? Simply put, we don't have a set timeline. Like I mentioned earlier, we really want to focus on how everyone in our programs experiences can be a little different. And some volunteer and older adult pairs take longer to get into the groove and to get comfortable with each other. And that's completely okay and completely normal. Instead of focusing on a quantitative measure for when to begin your projects like a number of visits or weeks. Think about it more qualitatively. Try to ask them questions like the following ones to yourself and kind of gauge if you think it's a good time to start project. You know, think about if you and your older adult feel comfortable talking to each other on a consistent basis, do you feel like you have a good sense of your older adults, interests and passions? Do you think that the two of you can work together to create something really meaningful to you both. And we also want to touch on how important it is to not rush your project. It's our goal to have you and your older adult working on a longitudinal project that takes more than one visit to complete. We want our older adults to engage the wealth of knowledge they've gained over their lifetime. And think critically about projects. Try to think of projects to do with your older adult that aren't superficial and can be worked on over the course of a few visits. This will best allow them to form ideas and thoughts even when you weren't with them. Something really important that I'll touch on later in this instructional video. Once you've gotten to know the older adult that you're working with and have a good sense of their interests. We want you to try to bring up the idea of working on a project as naturally as possible. This can seem a little daunting and maybe a little awkward. But if you try to weave it into conversation as naturally as possible, it will be a lot smoother for both you and the older adult. For example, maybe you're older adult worked in a really exciting career. That was very dynamic. Like maybe they were a firefighter or a nurse, you know, something that they have a lot of stories from and they tell you those stories a lot. And you've noticed that it seems to be something they really like to reminisce about. Maybe one day after they've told you these stories, you can ask if they'd be interested in writing some of these memories down with you and creating a memoir that they can share with their family and friends. Try to weave in the ideas you have for projects with the passions and interests and experiences that your older adult has when they talk about them. This will make it feel less like an obligation and more like a font opportunity to talk about something they love. And we're going to talk about some of the key things to keep in mind when you're working on developing a project and a project idea. The first thing is passion. We really want you to try to think of something that you're older adults talks about a lot seems to really love doing, seems select, reminisce about, you know, things that they love, that they would be interested in working on a project to model. At your initial visit, ask them about their past life, their hobbies, their occupation. Anything else that lets them talk about what they find pleasure in? Keep this information in mind when you're looking to find a project and try to merge both of your interests. And this can go even further than the initial visit through your first couple of visits if you still have it started on a project, try to be cognizant about what the older adult seems like to talk about and use this in forming your project ideas. I touched on this a bit a second ago. But another thing that we really like to encourage, but by no means you require is a project that builds on some kind of mutual interests. We find that U and older adults are best able to both contribute when it's something that you're both interested. But that being said, if you don't have a passion or interests that necessarily aligned exactly with the older adults. Say, maybe they really like cooking and you've never learned how to cook there. So ways that you can merge your ideas and interests together. One thing that we really like to encourage is learning from older adults because we think there's so much to learn from our older adults. So as in the scenario I was talking about just a second ago where the older adult loves to cook and you don't know how the two of you can work together to create a cookbook for beginners. This allows them to share their passion and allows you to learn. So that's a really good way to try to facilitate a project that focuses on collaboration and learning, even though you don't necessarily share the same interests as your older adult. Another thing we ask for you to keep in mind are the capabilities and circumstances of the o