older adults

  • Older Americans Month: Champion Your Health

    Older Americans Month: Champion Your Health

    Happy Older Americans Month! This year’s theme is Champion Your Health. At the Seattle Public Library, we work year-round to engage and connect older adults with programs and services that make a difference. Below you will find our free monthly programs and check out our calendar for all our older adult audience specific events! Stay tuned for Older Americans Month highlights on our… Continue reading

  • Understanding AI for Older Adults

    Understanding AI for Older Adults

    By popular demand, Seattle Public Library is excited to announce a fall series of workshops about understanding AI, in partnership with the AI Safety Awareness Project. The AI Safety Awareness Project is a volunteer organization dedicated to raising awareness about modern AI, highlighting its benefits and risks, and informing the public on how they can contribute to… Continue reading

  • Library Impact: A Dementia-Friendly Concert Series at the Memory Hub

    Library Impact: A Dementia-Friendly Concert Series at the Memory Hub

    On a Monday afternoon in mid-August, a spacious courtyard on Seattle’s First Hill is alive with flowers, music, dancing and quiet conversation. It is cloudy, but the mood is all sunshine at the Memory Hub, a dementia-specific community center on the Frye Museum campus founded by the University of Washington Memory and Brain Wellness Center.… Continue reading

  • May is Older Americans Month!

    Happy Older Americans Month! This year’s theme is Powered by Connection. At the Seattle Public Library, we work year round to engage and connect older adults with programs and services that make a difference. Below you will find our monthly programs. Stay tuned for Older Americans Month posts throughout May, highlighting booklists and more! NewHolly… Continue reading

  • Next Chapter Roundup

    Spring is in full swing and so is programming! Join us for some highlighted programs for older adults below. Events requiring registration are noted below; all Library events are free and open to the public. Find information and registration through the event links below or at spl.org/Calendar. Public Transit Orientation Do you want to feel more… Continue reading

  • Murder: What’s Age Got to Do With It?

    The beginning of autumn always makes me want to curl up with a good book and a steaming mug of tea and nothing is cozier to me than a cozy mystery. With protagonists ranging from “your average 30 something whose life has been upended and must return home” to (usually) “single women who inherit mysterious… Continue reading

  • Next Chapter Events Coming This Fall

    Kids are headed back to school, but it’s always a great time for adults to jump into a program and learn something, too. This fall, SPL is partnering with community partners to offer a broad set of programs geared for adults who would like to know more about Medicare, end-of-life planning, Social Security and more.… Continue reading

  • May is Older Americans Month

    May is Older Americans Month

    It’s Older Americans Month! We want to celebrate and honor our elders and challenge the narrative on aging not just in May, but throughout the whole year. Our society tends to view aging in a negative light and it doesn’t have to be that way; aging is beautiful, and it’s an experience that all humans… Continue reading

  • Aging in Place

    If you ask most adults where they’d like to live as they grow older, most everyone says that they want to age in their own homes or in their local neighborhoods. It makes sense. People want to feel comfortable and live near familiar streets, parks, stores, and, of course, to neighbors and friends. But, it’s… Continue reading

  • Celebrate “Olders”

    May is Older Americans Month. The pandemic has certainly put a spotlight on the experiences of older people and the continuing tropes of ageism. I regularly hear and read about the “elderly,” the “silver tsunami,” and “going off the demographic cliff.” In a more recent ugly iteration, some people have even questioned the resources needed to support the… Continue reading

  • Alzheimer’s and memory loss: You are not alone

    No one ever wants to hear a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, whether it’s for yourself, a family member or friend. The disease is progressive and has no cure. As Ann Hedreen writes in Her Beautiful Brain, a memoir about her mother’s illness, “I’m not up for this. Whatever this is.” It takes a community to support… Continue reading

  • Unmuted Spotlights the Connective Power of Personal Storytelling

    Seattle-based memoir author and writing coach Ingrid Ricks recently led a personal storywriting workshop for LGBTQIA seniors and their allies at Seattle’s GenPRIDE center. The workshop built a community of writers and generated an intriguing anthology of fourteen stories entitled Unmuted: Stories of Courage and Resilience from the GenPRIDE Community, released in October to celebrate… Continue reading

  • Positive Reflections of Older Adults in Movies

    It’s not so easy to find movies about characters in the 60+ age category, let alone ones that depict older adults in a positive light. Fortunately, some are available for free viewing on Kanopy and Hoopla attesting that seniors can indeed lead interesting and meaningful lives. My Old Lady, a 2014 English movie adapted from Israel… Continue reading

  • Life with an Aging Parent, Part 2 – Online Resources

    Whether you are an older person or someone with an older person in your life, here are a few of the many informative, helpful and readily available free Library online resources to consider trying out.  Many provide full-text article access.  I’ve heard my elderly father talk about price shopping, his health and wanting to read… Continue reading

  • Life with an Aging Parent: Part 1 – Books

    The first known use of the phrase “eldercare” was in 1960 and is defined as “the care of older adults and especially the care of an older parent by a son or daughter.” This has been becoming part of my world more in the last few years with my father, since other immediate family members… Continue reading

  • Movie Mondays: Life Begins at 50, or 60, or 70…

    The past few years have been been kind to actors “of a certain age” and audiences who are interested in smart films about people in late middle age to the senior years. Since 2012, Amour won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film, Enough Said showed us the highs and lows of dating in your 50s, and a pair… Continue reading

  • Give wisely and give often

    We’ve worked hard for our money. And now we want to give some of it back to the community. We’ve seen the donation kettles and the Seattle Times Fund for the Needy ads. But my watchword is to check before I write the check. Is the charity legitimate or has it just picked a worthy-sounding… Continue reading

  • It takes a village

    No matter what the government says, to my family and maybe to yours, we’re still in a depression. I’m remembering the stories my parents told me about the last Great Depression and glad that I hadn’t been around for that one. Now it’s my turn to worry. Continue reading