Kendal Institute on Community Engagement

The Kendal Institute on Community Engagement has been launched! What, you may wonder, is KICE? Well, let me tell you.

Late last summer Kendal at Granville was invited to submit an application for a grant of $5000 to help create programs that would promote the enrichment of lives of senior citizens. A committee of residents put the proposal together, choosing to focus on the importance of engagement with the wider community as a primary source of enrichment in our lives. In accordance with the ambitions of the granting agency, we were to try to devise a kind of program that would be useful not only for Kendal at Granville, but also, by replication, for senior communities anywhere in the country. It would, in short, be a model. We proposed to create the Kendal Institute on Community Engagement as the vehicle for organizing our efforts. Denison University accepted our invitation to partner with us as we moved forward in 2015. Early this month we received the happy news that our application had been successful.

Subsequent meetings of the steering committee have given shape to the activities that the Institute will soon sponsor. We have worked from with the basic assumption that people in retirement here at Kendal want to find ways in which they can share their talents, explore their hobbies, and cultivate new interests – all in the wider company of others who share these enthusiasms. What is often needed, we believe, is richer knowledge of the range of opportunities for participation that exist in our Licking County community. So the Kendal Institute will work to make such knowledge available – to link residents seeking opportunities with organizations that offer them.

There are, of course, all sorts of activities that invite the attention of seniors. Some appeal to the desire to be constructive volunteers in service endeavors; others appeal to those seeking a widening or deepening of their enthusiasms. But all promise to provide occasions for engagement. We decided to focus on three kinds of activities in this first year: 

1) organizations that seek to provide assistance to those in need of help or protection;

2) groups that invite participation in the arts, whether pictorial or dramatic or musical;

3) organizations that focus on the educational needs of society, whether children or adults.

Under the aegis of the Kendal Institute, Kendal at Granville will sponsor five events in the first half of 2015. All will be aimed at informing, exciting, and even inspiring residents to envision and reach for lives of fuller community engagement for themselves. In varying mixes these events will offer speakers, Q&A opportunities with community leaders, entertainment from school-associated performance groups, and of course – the essential ingredient of all successful meetings – refreshments. Most will probably occur at our new Amelia Gathering Room, but some might well take place off-site. All residents will be encouraged to attend these events, and non-residents from the wider community will also be invited.

To be more specific: in January we will kick off the Kendal Institute with a gathering that introduces all three of our focus areas for 2015 and that aims at generating some media attention. In subsequent months we will hold events that focus in turn on opportunities in the areas of social assistance, the arts, and education. We will conclude the schedule in May with a wider gathering that aims at celebrating our success in our first year (we are an optimistic group!) and at making plans for the future.

Clearly a lot remains undefined. But enthusiasm is high, and with each passing fortnight more and more of the details are falling into place. And so it is not too early to go public with the happy news that the Kendal Institute on Community Engagement has set sail. We hope you'll consider joining the voyage.