On Wednesday April 27th, Senior Services broke ground on its new Intergenerational Center for Arts and Wellness, with more than 200 community leaders, elected officials, volunteers, collaborators, donors and friends in attendance.

The groundbreaking event launched what will be an estimated 14-month construction timeline to build a 61,000-square-foot Intergenerational Center for Arts & Wellness for adults with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of memory loss. At the Center, Senior Services will provide activities, programming and collaborative endeavors with a proven ability to stimulate and benefit senior adults, such as intergenerational programming with organizations who serve other age groups and art and creativity-based initiatives. The new center will be built on property owned by Senior Services, adjacent to its headquarters on Shorefair Drive.

Through this project, Senior Services seeks to address local community needs and increase its positive impact on the surrounding neighborhood, the City of Winston Salem and Forsyth County, focused on their core mission of serving older adults through an innovative arts-based intergenerational approach. Overall goals of the new Intergenerational Center are as follows: 

• Provide a new, expanded home to serve the anticipated future demand at their award-winning Elizabeth and Tab Williams Adult Day Center.
• Serve the social-emotional and educational needs of seniors by offering intergenerational programming and classes for older adults, through collaborations with other well-established community organizations.
• Offer a creativity-based approach to programming for older adults, with resident artists to work with the participants at the site. Programmatic space will be designed to maximize the impact on the lives of older adults, building on people’s inherent creativity and maximizing opportunity for connection, engagement and community collaboration.
• Provide wellness services through focus on exercise and physical activity, recreational activity, healthcare and nutrition services, as well as physical, occupational and emotional therapy. 

In addition to serving as the new home for the Elizabeth and Tab Williams Adult Day Center, there are a number of collaborating organizations that will also occupy dedicated space in the new Center, including Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist Sticht Center for Healthy Aging and Alzheimer’s Prevention, Family Services (child development center), HandsOn NWNC, Hispanic League, Novant Health, Sawtooth School for Visual Art, Second Harvest’s Providence and Winston-Salem State University Health Sciences. Organizations using shared spaces include Senior Services Senior Lunch nutrition program, Arts Council of Winston-Salem, Cancer Services, 40+ Stage Company, Maya Angelou Center for Health Equity, Shepherd’s Center of Greater Winston-Salem, IMPROVment and the Winston-Salem Symphony.

For more information on this transformative project, visit ccc.seniorservicesinc.org.