Older Adults and Digital Inclusion

I'm gonna talk a bit about... I started OATS 20 years ago. So I'm kind of an interesting case study in longevity in the field, and I guess stickiness in a career. We've learned a little bit along the way about building an institution around digital inclusion.

So I'll give a little bit of the history of that. And then I'll give a little snapshot of what we're doing kind of today. And then I'll talk a little bit about what we've learned about -- particularly older adults as a population demographic, in terms of how people use tech, and how we can think about being more inclusive. And then we'll have plenty of time for Q and A. Fair?

All right. So my background with digital inclusion goes back to -- I had a job. My first job out of college. On 40 Prince Street, which is like 2 blocks from here.

I used to come down here and work for a group called Urban Homesteading Assistance Board. Our job was to help tenant associations renovate city properties and turn them into affordable co-ops. The co-ops had these community rooms, and around 1993 or so, one of our staff leaders came by and said: We're working with the federal government on this really cool thing called the Technology Opportunities Program, and we're gonna go put desktop PC stations in some of the community rooms in the co-ops.

So all the way back in 1993, there was an effort to think about community technology. We were coming out of a community development framework. So there was kind of a housing and services model. And at that time, the thinking was: Empower the organizations, by getting some technology into their spaces, so that the tenants' associations could manage their bookkeeping and their planning and work with communications and things.

And also some people could also gain some job skills around it. And it was meant to be sort of a service development program as well. So I worked with that. That was the first federal involvement in doing something around digital inclusion.

And that more or less sunsetted after two or three years. And then there was kind of crickets for a number of years. And I started OATS in 2004. When I was working in lower Manhattan, after 9/11.

And we were building a website to try to bring residents and businesses back into the community. A lot of people still live in lower Manhattan, as you probably know. And back then, it was really a challenge to get folks to be able to get dry cleaning and restaurants and stuff kind of rekindled. So we created a website.

And I got a phone call from an 87-year-old woman who said: I'm really interested in coming to this web launch party, but I don't know what the web is, and I don't know if I would feel welcome. I was a community activist. So when you say you think you might not feel welcome to my event, it kind of set off a bell. I asked her name, which was Pearl.

And I said: Come find me at the end and I will teach you whatever you need to know. I was all cavalier. You know. And so she comes, and one thing leads to another, and 8:00 on the next Monday morning, she shows up at my office for a volunteer tutoring session and she's got her breakfast wrapped up in a napkin.

And I say... Pearl, this is the mouse. I want you to point at that button on the website and see if you can click at it. She takes the mouse and takes it off the desk and starts pointing it.

I'm like... Okay. Put the mouse back down on the desk. But it was a moment.

Because it really got me to understand that my framework wasn't her framework. I was the first generation of people that... I grew up in Asbury Park, New Jersey. And I remember on the boardwalk, going to the arcade and watching them take out the old pinball machines and analog arcade games, and replace them with Asteroids and the digital interfaces.

So my generation of high school students was the first group that played Pong. The notion that you're manipulating a mouse or something on your desk and you're watching it on the screen was kind of second nature to me, by 2004. But Pearl had never done that. She had literally never worked a joystick in her life and had never had that experience.

So just the notion of an input device and where she was coming from presented me with some real challenges. So we worked together for about a year. And I realized that she was really taking off. She was founding a synagogue in lower Manhattan.

She was harassing the local public officials by email. They were calling me and telling me to stop. I was like... Keep at them!

Keep at them! She got a bus shelter in front of the hallmark, kind of near where Stuyvesant High School is, on West Avenue, down in Battery Park City. She was really kind of flourishing with this. I was looking to see what other organizations were working on it, and there weren't a lot of resources trying to get old people online.

Which is sort of strange. Because you think about what old folks are dealing with, around mobility, social engagement, economic stability, and how many resources technology can put at your fingertips. But there's this adoption curve, and older people tend to be on the backend of the adoption curve. And in 2004, only 26% of people over 65 had ever been on the internet.

Which was about a third of the rate for younger people. So I started OATS to try to address that. I was in Park Slope, at my kitchen table, with my puppy. Who then grew into full dog adulthood and has since passed on.

But OATS is still here. And the first thing that we did was... What today would be called co-design. I saw some people that do UX design here.

And I didn't really know how to get something started, except to go talk to the people that were -- the target population. So I went to the housing groups I worked with. I went to the resident groups that kind of were the leadership groups. And they were almost all people over 60.

And they remembered me from housing. So they said: Yeah, we want to work with you on this new project. They didn't quite know what I was trying to figure out. I sat down and said: What do you want to learn?

And more importantly, how do you want to learn it? What is the right way from a format standpoint to bring some technology in here, but give you a positive experience? There already were curriculums that showed people how to use the internet. But they were written by -- forgive me for the reference -- they were written by technology people.

And so the first 50 pages were things like: How to resize your desktop icons, and the parts of the computer. Like that's really important to know. And file management. And all these kind of... Engineering sort of topics.

But none of it talked to you about: What is the internet? What is the web? And how do you get email? Which is really what people wanted.

And so we sat down from scratch and said: Well, let's start with that. And how can we get you, as quickly as possible, to a successful experience? And the courses that were being taught at the time were in the Housing Authority. They were taught every week for three hours.

It was a three hour session. So you went from... 2 to 5 pm. And then you went back a week later and people had taken the classes and I interviewed them.

They said... It's overwhelming. You know? Three hours is too much.

And by the time we come back a week later, we can't remember any of it, and we don't have any real opportunity to figure out how to practice. So we kind of observed people learning. And the men can go for about an hour and a quarter, and then they start peeling off to go to the bathroom. And so that became the limit of the class.

Let's do an hour and a quarter of classroom time. And since people need the reinforcement, let's teach twice a week. And then we said... How much... Could you afford a class?

Could you pay for it? What's the finances around this? And the vast majority of people said... We're already on fixed incomes.

If we want to start using technology, we have to maybe buy a computer or pay for internet. It's overwhelming. And so it's a real barrier to have to pay $20 or $50 or $100 for a class. So I made the commitment to try to do it for free at the time.

And the funders we talked to said... I had funders say... We're not gonna give you money, because you're giving it away for free, and we don't think you'll sustain the operation. And here we are, 20 years later.

Many of those people have since retired. But we were able to figure out a revenue model, coming from mostly non-profits that needed community programming. And you would show up and sort of provide a tech program for seniors in their centers. And they would write a small check.

$15,000 for the summer, and we would deliver a class. I worked with a lot of high school students. So we got it off the ground with an adaptive curriculum focused on the basics. It went for 10 weeks.

People stretched out for 10 weeks and came to the classes. And we had 98% graduations from people. They really loved it and participated. The curriculum was oriented around what people wanted to learn and people started building community out of that.

The second level of curriculum we ended up teaching was not intermediate technology. It was workforce technology. I asked people why they were there. And 60% of the people in the room said they were looking for jobs.

Today the numbers have changed a bit. Partly because we're working with a broader population out there. But it's still between 10% and 30% of adults trying to get online are looking for some way to increase household revenue, whether it's a job, entrepreneurship, gig economy, or managing finances. So we really ended up focusing a lot on sort of how people use tech for financial purposes.

And that became a popular program around the city. We started teaching all over New York City. And then the second wave of federal funding hit. So for some reason, every time there's an economic crisis, the Department of Commerce gets excited about digital inclusion and decides to expand broadband in America as part of their stimulus program.

In 2008, the Obama era, there was an effort to build more stimulus efforts, and they increased broadband around the country. And as part of those funding patterns, they added money for computer centers and technology training. So for the first time, after we had started in 2004, almost ten years later, we suddenly had access to some federal dollars that might be able to give us resources. We got the City of New York to apply for the grant, with us as the sole partner.

And then we put up all the matching funds. Because everything we did was sort of match-eligible. So we got the grant, and in 2013, we opened our first ever center for technology for older adults. It's actually the first technology themed community center for older adults in America.

We did a lot of research. We've never found another one that was there before. And we were very excited about that. It's on 25th Street.

It's still there. We are moving it to 30th Street this year. So if you want to see it in transition... And we continue to teach free classes there.

And instead of calling it the OATS center, we realized that people were coming and they wanted to learn the technology, but they really wanted to connect to each other. They were taking a class, and they were coming to me and saying: I went to the OATS website and I don't really understand what I'm supposed to do with that. I said... You're not supposed to go to the OATS website.

It's set up as more of a corporate non-profit website. We needed a place for people to go, and we created Senior Planet as a landing place for older people that wanted to do something cool. I was listening to Hip Hop music at the time, and Fear of a Black Planet was the album of the year or something. And I was like... That's so empowering!

Senior Planet. We're taking over and we're gonna make it ours! So we called the center Senior Planet. And it was a resounding success.

We got lots of media, we got people from all over the country to come visit. And it really started to create some momentum around what you could do with older adults learning tech. Not so much just because the classes were interesting, but more what people were doing with it. I remember I sat up in the corner there with my laptop a lot, and I would just kind of observe.

And commune with people and find out what they were doing. And a woman pulled me aside after the first quarter or so, and she said: I love what you're trying to do here. And the language is important. You know?

It wasn't like... I love the class and I learned from Johnny. It was like... I get that you're trying to do something special.

And I feel that. And I care about it. And so... You know, somebody came up with a slogan: Aging with attitude.

And that went right up on the wall. It kind of characterized what we were talking about. Come in here. Use the technology.

But it's not about the tech. And increasingly, it became about these amazing stories that were emerging. People starting businesses and people finding old Army buddies from the Korean War and doing reunions and people writing memoirs and story events. One guy wrote a musical play, I guess it was a musical performance that he wrote, and it was before the movie came out -- it was called The Green Book.

Where people would go around the South and you couldn't stay at regular hotels. And he had experienced it. African American guy. And he wrote this musical about it and they wanted to workshop it.

We brought all this technology in and workshopped it and broadcast it around the country to all the senior centers. It just showed the creativity and what people were doing with tech. So that became a starting point for a broader movement around aging and tech. We shifted the focus and said: We harness technology to change the way we age.

We're not so much... I kind of woke up one day and I was like... I don't really care how many people use Microsoft products. It's not... I'm working for a non-profit.

I don't want to devote my whole life to becoming the tech support program that these big companies should have had without me, in the first place. But here we're sort of filling a gap. What's really exciting here is that there's the longevity revolution happening at the same time as a technology revolution. We're adding all these years to the human lifespan.

And I think sometimes about it a little bit like Battery Park City. Because when the City of New York began digging the subways, they had all this extra dirt. And they just threw it over on the Hudson side of Manhattan downtown. And it was just this big open field that was new.

That wasn't even there 20 or 30 years before. But suddenly we had all this land available. But nobody knew what to put there. It was completely new.

We started doing urban planning processes around it, and eventually they came up with Battery Park City, a pretty good answer to the challenge at the time. I think of aging that way. We added these years to the human lifespan, but we haven't figured out what to do with it. There are golf carts in Florida and 60% of new entrepreneurs are older, and they're carrying their communities and doing all this cool stuff.

But all of our education funds are front loaded in our lives. People don't tend to naturally go back to college at 60, which would make a lot of sense these days. A lot of our service programs are oriented around kind of frailty and dependence. But that's not just really the... That doesn't capture what's really going on for people.

And so the technology creates an opportunity to do more and do better. And so we're exploring some of those outcomes, and at OATS, we found kind of five major areas where people are really getting results. One is most obviously -- social engagement. You've got tech as the big convener.

So we have millions and millions of people coming on for Facebook and things like that. But you also get financial security. Both income and managing household finances. We did a project at Queensbridge Houses where we knocked on every single senior-headed household door in Queensbridge, which is the largest public housing program in North America.

And we asked people what they wanted. And a lot of them wanted financial security training, and virtually no one had ever done a household budget. So we kind of designed a budget and financial program with people. We got it funded by a local bank, Citi in that case, and founded this program that people used to help manage their finances.

People had never looked at their income and expenses and had a chance to do that. A lot of it was really empowering. We found real opportunities in health and wellness and fitness, and creative expression and civic participation. Which is kind of being politically active.

That initiative grew to first a state-wide footprint, we started looking at other states, and we began expanding. We expanded into Denver, where we started another center. We expanded into Texas and San Antonio and Maryland in Montgomery County. And about 6 years ago, we had been working at it for about 4 or 5 years and grown quite a bit, but not hugely.

There's not a lot of resources available for this stuff. There's no national program for tech and seniors. So we were kind of cobbling together funding from New York City and San Antonio and private funders and banks and whoever we could get it from. And we got a call from AARP.

And they were saying: You know, we are looking for ways to expand our programming capability. And we don't want to have to invent it from scratch. We're looking for a non-profit sort of affiliate. Almost like a corporate merger, but in the non-profit sector, it's an affiliation.

They selected us as a partner, and after a year of negotiation, we decided to become an AARP affiliate. There's only four affiliates in the nation, and we're the only tech one.

So I'll snapshot to the present. Our impact has grown almost 20 times from before, in 2019, before we joined up. Part of that is because COVID happened and Zoom happened. So our channel became much more robust.

And we were able to get our curriculum out to 500,000 people that we couldn't reach before now. Last year, we served 670,000 visitors.

And about 500,000, roughly, were in the online space. So Senior Planet is no longer just a center. It's seniorplanet.org. And we still don't charge older adults for classes.

If you or your elderly friends or relatives want to go online tonight and take a class, or tomorrow, yes.

We like to let you self-define. So we target people over 60. The average Senior Planet participant is between 70 and 75, depending on the location. Online, it's about 70.

In person, it's usually 75, 76. But we allow people 50 and up to join classes in person. We don't check IDs. But we do try to celebrate aging.

So we tip our orientation toward the older population, around 65, 75. Because that group often doesn't get programs in the aging space. There is more available for people in the 50 to 60 crowd. So they're served.

So with Senior Planet, you don't have to have registration. We're redoing the website this year. I think we're still not gonna have registration. We want it to be as friction-free as possible.

If you go to the center on 25th Street, you'll notice there's no elevator. Because we wanted it to be fully accessible from the sidewalk. The new space on 30th Street, no elevator. Because it's fully accessible from the sidewalk.

We opened a center in Miami, in Wynwood, a very non-traditional place for a senior technology program, but also a really powerful statement about where the center of Miami's creativity and technology programming is. So people said... Why would you do something for older adults in Wynwood? It's where all the cool young people are.

I said... Because people like you were gonna ask that question! And it really challenged people to realize that Miami is not just rich in this neighborhood and poor over here. So segregated.

There's a huge number of people living in those communities that are getting kind of pushed out or gentrified, and they're looking for programs. And so the Center in Miami is double the numbers we're predicting, and it's challenging New York for -- we're getting close to 100 people a day coming through there, and we have incredible testimonials, and the City of Miami has a thing called Tech Equity Miami, a neat funding model which brings together corporate funders and community partners.

So they gave us some money to do a project on small business that's partly funded by JP Morgan Chase this year.

The mayor's office is bringing people from the Parks Department. There's a lot of vitality there. So the website has a call center associated with it. So if you go to Senior Planet.org, I will never remember the name of the call center.

I don't know why I have a mental block about it. It's on the front page of the website. It is free. 9 to 8 pm, Eastern time.

People can call with their tech questions. And we don't... You ask... What is a tech question?

You let me know what you have, and we'll see if we can come up with a solution to it. And people seem to really benefit from it. I get a lot of postcards and emails from people saying... Oh my God.

They were actually patient with me and helped me solve the problem. And it has become a real resource. We serve tens of thousands of people a year on the call center. We have 160 locations where OATS personnel go out and teach across the country.

Typically around where we have the center. New York, Denver, Miami, Northern California, San Jose, Montgomery County, San Antonio, did I say that already? Those are the main areas. And then we realized that we have more resources available than we can specifically deploy with our staff.

We have like 2500 pages of curriculum. And a lot of it -- more than half of the curriculum is available in Spanish and Chinese. And now we've got Vietnamese and Haitian Creole to add to it. So there's a lot of content available.

And it would be irresponsible of us to think that our staff should be out there teaching -- only teaching that curriculum and no one else could ever use it. Right? Because there are 11,000 senior centers in the United States alone. Not counting low income housing developments, multiservice agencies, you know, health organizations that are out there.

There's just an endless group of community partners. And so we created a thing called Senior Planet licensing, that originally we were trying to figure out how to get the partners to pay for it. That turned out to be challenging, because a lot of the best partners are the ones with the least money. So we decided to make that free as well.

Now we have 480 community partners in 37 states that license our curriculum. We give you a five-week training and once we're comfortable you know the curriculum and the model, it downloads all the materials, outreach stuff, translations, trainer guides, and people report back how many people they served and satisfaction around -- we use a net promoter score measure. Which is kind of a corporate way of measuring whether you like it or not.

And we do some surveys and research around that. So we've got a huge kind of... What I think of as a pretty robust community site program as well. We work with AARP.

So we get to work with all 50 state offices, our team in Washington, they're a little bit more bureaucratic than we are, but they're also doing really great work and they're really true believers in trying to help older people succeed and get access to more resources. So having them kind of... You know, supporting us financially a little bit, and then also really being good partners for a lot of the programs has enabled us to reach a lot more people.

So that's the snapshot of where we are. The new headquarters is between 7th and 8th. We're up there working our butts off. You got me on the right day of the week here.

And we have the center opening on 30th Street, moving from 25th Street, also free of charge and available for folks. We do a lot of research as well. And just very briefly, I think I have three minutes... Am I doing okay?

My timekeeper wandered out of the room. I'm doing fine. Tom, you awake back there? You know it's bad when the timekeeper is sleeping.

So what we've learned around sort of special considerations of older adults -- you know, we're doing a project right now where we're interviewing gerontologists, and people often say -- oh, I've developed this new app. Or this new device. And you say... Oh, that's wonderful.

You say it's for seniors. That's great. Tell me the story of how you came to develop this thing. My fill in the blank older relative was afflicted by the fill in the blank medical challenge and I served them as a caretaker for a number of years and was traumatized by that and learned that technology could help them and developed this sensor-based program or some device or program to help them and now I'm launching it through some kind of competition to gain funding.

I say... How did you test it with older adults? Well, I tested it on my relative and they said it's great. You end up with... We can do more with that.

We can have a process around it and do test bedding. We now do test beds for people who are developing products and services. You can bring them to the center and we try to do a triage of what's most useful and helpful and test that out and people give feedback and it helps people design products better and helps us do better training. So that our stuff is more relevant to the end users.

But it turns out that most older adults -- most developers don't test stuff... Well, they don't test stuff at all in the first place. But they also don't test it with older adults. We worked with AARP a while back to create a guide for technology design for designers that are doing tech design for older adults.

Special considerations. And we looked at things like: Co-design is critical. You need to immerse yourself with older folks to understand -- they call it job to be done or what their user experience needs might be. But start from an anthropological frame of mind.

Sit down and observe. And then maybe ask a few questions and then observe some more and think about what might be helpful and design the product upward from the user need and you might come up with something that gets deployed and might sustain. So we've been trying to create kind of an approach to that, and encouraging people to talk to gerontologists or people who have long-term expertise in the field. We realize we haven't done that systematically ourselves.

We're interviewing a dozen gerontologists next week. We did four of them this week. They called out some things that are really interesting. People pointed out when you work with young people, you know where to find them.

They're all in schools. If you go to public schools and add some private schools, you're gonna get a good swath of where the K to 12 people are. When you try to find older adults in the community, they're not in schools. They're all over the place.

It's incredibly fragmented. There isn't one institutional place where you know everybody is gonna pass through at a given time. You have to think about senior centers. Do you know what percent of New Yorkers go to a Senior Center in any given year?

Sometimes around 5%, 6%. It's not a big number. Most adults are not in senior centers. They're in community sites and things like that.

But they're not always in institutional spaces. You have to find different throughputs to get people in different places. So the licensing program we have -- we license to any non-commercial entities. Libraries, housing groups, YMCAs, urban league groups, anybody who can put 25 older adults in a room, we'll work with you.

But part of the model is you have to find the channels that are really diverse to reach people. Secondly, there's an enormous hunger and demand for focusing on health and wellness. Right now, you know, we put lots and lots of curriculum online, and watch who attends what and what the ratings are. Our fitness programs are so popular that it's literally a problem.

We run something called the Morning Stretch, our best program in the morning. We had a guy named Caz, who was running the fitness program on 25th Street in person. When we went online, he went online. Turns out he is like Mr. Rogers with this fitness program.

People cannot get enough of this guy. First it was 50 people a day at the new Zoom class. That's a lot. Now it's 100.

Then it was 300. Last week it was 850!

It's just really a very popular... It's called Morning Stretch. People go on, they love the program. You've got to see him.

He's kind of Eastern influenced but he also does a little martial arts stuff. Something about it is hypnotic. Very successful programs around fitness. It's not just that one class.

There are so many people coming to fitness classes that we have to try to diversify out of them a little bit to make sure that the other things that we care about are getting touched. So we do open mic night, we do programs around songwriting for people, virtual travel is super popular. Where we have a live person who is doing the guiding. We did the Great Wall of China, we did one in Central America recently, and then people log on and they go through the tour with a camera and they can ask questions, interact with a guide in realtime, and the group is together through Zoom.

It's really kind of fun. Programming like that is really active for people. And then there's a lot of programs on AI -- super popular. We work with OpenAI.

I know. Don't throw bricks at me. But they've been really helpful with us and helped us build curriculum and we're regranting with their money, helping them teach classes on the grassroots level to see what works and what's helpful for people. We're learning a lot about what people are interested in.

The vast majority of older adults -- it may not be a secret to people in this room -- are perfectly capable of learning the technology. You have to understand where people are starting. Some people are really still beginners with some of it or have some anxiety around it. We live in such an age where there are so many negative messages coming to people around aging and tech that you have to overcome that by just relieving people of the stress, saying... We'll stay with you as long as you stay with us.

And no one has ever not learned this stuff, if you continue the class. There's no test and it's not very stressful. But we really learned to make it relevant, and methodologically appropriate for people. And we've had a lot of success getting people to keep coming.

So we're still growing. Budget is around $20 million this year. We've got 80 staff. And it's been quite a journey.

So... I'll stop there, because I want to make sure we have a chance for Q and A and comments from people. Did I do okay, Ben? All right.

Thank you so much, Tom. We've already got a lot of questions online from YouTube. We'll be able to take questions until about 8:30. So thank you, Tom, for giving us a lot of time.

Anyone have a question here in the room first?

We'll take it to Joly back here.

Let me just switch the camera here.

The focus of this group is accessibility and disability. And the growing population of people with disabilities is obviously the aging population. Do you have any particular programs to help people deal with oncoming disabilities -- screen readers or cognitive disabilities? We do.

It's relatively limited at OATS, and I'll explain why. We do programs periodically around adaptive devices. We'll do a session where we bring people in who are experts in hearing adaptive devices or visual impairment resources for people. We'll do workshops on it, but people sort of come out of curiosity.

The most popular of those programs is around hearing. Which seems to have the largest kind of... Most broad impact from the population that we're working with. And we also train people, all the volunteers and the center staff, to be good with adaptive devices on phones, and on the PCs and laptops.

Most of the things that we come up with are... Of the level of challenge where there's somebody that has an impairment -- but they're still able to show up at the center by themselves. So they're mobile, they're able to function in a group, but they may need a higher contrast keyboard or higher contrast screen setting, they may need seating at the front of the room. Or we'll set somebody up with a mic and a headphone set so they can hear the speaker better.

And then we get to the point where you've got people that have more severe impairments, and our position on this is that disability and aging are kind of sister enterprises. But they are separate in some ways. And you know... I have a pretty severely disabled teenager that I am a caretaker for.

And she's 18 years old. And she's dealing with a lot of the issues around disability that older people may have around mobility. But that has nothing to do with her age. Right?

But they're all dealing with wheelchairs and elevators and the kinds of things that we're handling. I spent some time at the Lighthouse Guild last week, and we did a tour there. When they mentioned Aira -- I don't know if people have ever used Aira, but I think it's one of the coolest things in the world. It allows you... You turn it on and there's a live person looking through a camera that can tell you what you're looking at.

I walked around Manhattan with a friend from the CTA Foundation, Matt, if anybody knows him, and he showed me what Aira was showing him. So some of these accessibility tools are amazing, but they're very distinctive to the user, and there are organizations that are really good at deploying them that are expert on that. So we've worked with groups like Lighthouse Guild and have come in and done workshops. And we do back and forth handoffs where somebody needs the expertise that they have.

It's beyond our scope to be able to deliver it well. So we know where to go with something and know how to support the network, but we try not to overreach with what we're doing and try to do their work and they tend to bring people to us when they know that they're feeling it as an aging person, as well as someone with a disability, and we're celebrating that aging experience for people.

It's a pretty good collaboration, but it's not a specialization of ours.

Great. Thank you. Now we're gonna take a question from out there on YouTube. How can we volunteer with this program?

Or can you volunteer? Ah-ha. So the easiest way to follow up for random questions -- and that's not a random question, but for things I don't have a resource in front of me for -- if you email [email protected], you will go to the central mailbox. Put at the top: Tom said to email you about -- and you will immediately get their attention.

Which you would anyways, but it's helpful. We do have volunteer opportunities. They are often at the centers. So if you're located in New York and you wanted to come to the center and do some volunteering, we definitely work with volunteers.

I will say that we tend to use volunteers in a pretty intensive way, so people often come in for 10 hours a week or more. And they get trained and they're responsible for really doing different elements of it. We've got... We have a volunteer group that does digital volunteers as well, that I just spent an hour with last week.

There's about 20 of them. And they're doing coaching online for people as well. So if you mention that you wanted to connect with a volunteer group online, that's run by Fiona Adams. If you want to connect to the local sites in New York, Denver, Miami, or San Antonio would be the places we've got enough capacity to really work with volunteers.

Great. Thanks. I'll take your question over here. And we use corporate volunteers as well.

If you work for a big company and you want to volunteer, we will ask your company to write us a check and then you will have the opportunity to volunteer. Welcome to sustainability. That is a good way to get funding and stuff like that. Which you mentioned earlier.

I was just curious, because you mentioned having a hard time identifying where to find older adults in general. Do you guys consider partnering with community-based organizations in different neighborhoods? You tend to find us more in the outer Boroughs than Manhattan. But generally you will find older adults more engaged in those things.

Especially family enrichment centers tend to engage older adults and they often are looking for programming possibilities. Some of them get grants to do older adult inclusion. If you have this curriculum and you're trying to distribute it, that would be a great distribution possibility. We have a roster of community organizations in all five Boroughs that we work with, in New York.

We work with currently about 45 groups in the city every year. But there's a lot more groups than we're currently connecting with. So if there is somebody in a neighborhood that you think is particularly a good fit, send them my way. We would be happy to... I've got a team that goes out and does the vetting.

We don't need to, because we've got too many partners that are already out there. I used to be on Community Board six in Brooklyn, so I know the networks. We also work a lot with the Department of the Aging in New York. There's 238 senior centers in this city.

They have a whole list of them and they prioritize based on both capacity on the one side but also need on the other. Some of the centers don't have any resources. Outside -- so they'll... [inaudible] give the mic.

The idea is to spread awareness of the fact that this is an option. Because I've never heard of this program, and I'm involved with Community Board 5, which has one of the larger populations of older adults. Send a note and we'll send a person to give you a presentation. We've got a guy that does that.

Making connections at our Meetup! You're right next door to us! We have a question from online. This is from our technical audience.

Is the curriculum available in a way that is web content accessibility guideline AA compliant? That's a good question. I knew I was gonna get this one. We teach -- the curriculum is downloaded.

It's taught in classrooms, with books. So people print it out. We have had many places that do Sign Language interpretation in the classroom. We have places that do printouts with different sized fonts and things like that.

But it's really a paper curriculum for that purpose. The online classes are Zoom. So we're limited to some degree to the capabilities of Zoom. But the captioning of course is available and things like that.

We don't get a lot of requests for additional adaptation from that. The website itself is -- conforms somewhat to the more modern versions of the adaptability standards. And I work with AARP and I was just down there harassing them about this last quarter, because I knew I was gonna come and talk to you guys. I talked to the guy who runs the AARP website.

And he said... These are the various things we've been doing to upgrade it lately. They're making an effort. I don't think any of us are there yet, in terms of the level of website adaptability we need to have, frankly.

Okay. I'll take a question here.

The new center that you're opening -- is that larger? More services? What's the difference? The new center you're opening on 30th Street?

It's a little bit larger. And we wanted a space where we could have our... The team of staff that work at headquarters was always in Brooklyn, in Gowanus, and the program site was on 25th Street. The 25th Street site is a little bit small now.

We need about 3,000 square feet and it's closer to 2. And the team in the headquarters was always moving back and forth and not able to participate in the programs very well. So we realized when the real estate market in Manhattan is actually relatively affordable for commercial spaces right now -- so we were able to find a space that's like $75 a square foot. Not very expensive.

So we realized we had an opportunity kind of once in a generation to be able to pick a larger space, at about the same price point, and bring the team in, to be able to be on top of them. So we're relocating to 30th Street. It's also a little closer to the subway, and we know the transportation hub element increases the numbers. So it's... You know, it's... This year, we're financially... It won't pay off.

But in the next five years, I think eventually it will make a lot of sense. And the space is beautiful. Double height ceiling. Balconies.

Let's all go! All right. We've got a question from online. You talked about the curriculum being available in other languages.

How much does OATS engage seniors in communities where English is not their primary language? It's one of our specialties. They do it a lot. The space in Miami they speak Spanish more than English.

I speak Spanish, so I'm committed to it. When we were expanding outside our initial program sites, we went to the Bronx. So we spent a lot of time at Castle Hill Senior Center up at the Bronx. So Spanish was a sweet spot for us for a long time.

We taught in New York in Russian. We did a whole bunch of stuff on trauma-informed care. So we spent a lot of time with Russian immigrants for a while. And in Northern California, we've got a really strong program in San Jose, which is primarily Asian languages.

Where English is definitely a second language for folks. We had a guy from China there, kind of an intense story. A couple of months ago, we were teaching a course in a community center -- I think it's... I don't know the name of the group.

I know the acronym. But they're mostly a Chinese language center. Gentleman from China was there. He learned how to put his emergency contact on his -- I guess he had an Apple Watch.

And set it for the automatic fall detection. And put his building super as his emergency contact. Went home. A few days later, had a catastrophic fall in the apartment.

Was severely injured. The watch called the super, the super broke down the door, they called the ambulance, they came and rescued this guy. And we didn't know. He didn't come to class for a few weeks.

He came back, and the trainer's name was Effie Zhong. He said... I need to say something to the class. He told that story and said... This saved my life.

Stuff like that can kind of... Make you... Know that you're making a difference there. But I'm really proud that more than half the curriculum now is in languages other than English.

Haitian Creole in Miami is -- we teach classes there. We've had some traction with that program. Vietnamese in San Jose is now up and running. And Chinese in Montgomery County, Maryland, for some reason, which is not a place I would have thought of as a hotbed of Chinese speakers.

But there's a lot of Chinese speakers in Montgomery County Maryland. So we got a course there that got funded by the county and we're spreading it around the country. It's a priority for us.

Thank you for this talk. It's been incredible. I'm curious if you think there's a future where tech companies are doing more to proactively design for aging populations. And if... Yeah.

There would be partnership with you all of like sharing best practices or being able to have a relationship with this community and share feedback in a more directed way. Yeah. To some degree, it's already happening at some level. There's all these networks out there now.

AARP has the thing called the Age Tech Collaborative. Where they have all these tech companies that come together to talk about aging and the aging market and how to work with people. They've got access to startups. The startups are coming and getting startup funding and pitching things and they're able to accelerate programs.

So there's something happening there. New York City... There used to be a group called Aging 2.0, which was... An international network of groups that were promoting sort of age positive corporate and tech programs.

And they had a lot of sort of pitch events, and programs and companies were coming in and interacting with them. Some of the tech companies like... There's a group called Intuition Robotics that developed a social robot called the LEQ, and they spent a lot of time testing that out with older adults and working with gerontologists and community partners around it. So there's stuff happening.

We tend to work with some of the larger corporations, because it's sort of where I need to go get money. But we'll work with Comcast, and would you be surprised how open they are to us telling them what people want and bringing people down. We brought people down to the Google headquarters when they were doing Google Translate and brought folks to workshop it and give them feedback. The participants are not shy.

They go... I hate this feature. That isn't working at all. They give good feedback.

Sony brought some engineers to our center to run some of their prototype stuff a few years ago to show people that. There's some interest. The issue for a lot of them is they're still unaware of the value of the market, to some degree. There's this tendency to think that the older adult market isn't lucrative enough or people don't spend money as much.

So we have to kind of educate them that there's a market there, and there's a profit to be made. Regulation matters. To some degree. So if you can... If they're in a regulatory environment, the telecoms particularly, but the health companies -- Medicare Advantage now has a requirement that they have a health equity component to the Medicare Advantage plans.

So... If you are trying to access your health information or your health services and there's a disparity that could be identified with a specific demographic, then they're required to address it. And if they don't, it dings their star rating. And the star rating triggers the reimbursement rates from CMS.

So we're talking about hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars at stake for making sure that this stuff is accessible broadly to different populations. Older adults particularly have challenges with accessing healthcare information through the technology lens. And so United works with us, for example, as an onramp for people who are struggling to get access to their United information. They send them to us and we train them on the stuff and put them on the hotline to make sure they get access to stuff.

It's valuable for them. And allows them to reach more person with programs and services.

There's a lot more to go here. I'm sorry. You told me not to have long answers. We're 2% where we need to go.

But it's not totally there. Sorry, Ben. I promised you I wouldn't do that. He said one minute answers.

We have so many questions, which is awesome. Let's take this one here. What proportion of engagement is in real life versus virtual or online? About... 80/20 right now.

Roughly. Could be 75/25.

Something like that. Lovely to hear about this whole evolutionary arc. I know somewhere in there you discovered for yourself the beauties of essentially what we would call UX research and user-centered design. And how that was kind of... A revelation.

So that's lovely to hear. But then you said something in passing, and I was... I figured you must have some reason for saying this. You said that adults age 60 really should be going back to college.

Was that... Were you just tossing that off? Or is there something behind that?

I spent a lot of time with people that are more sort of broad geriatric experts or gerontologist experts that are... Studying sort of human life patterns. And what we're finding is that...

I'll break my own rule. Sorry. I will not touch the microphone again. I'll break my own rule and reference my own family for a second.

My grandparents, when they turned 60 or 65, were thinking... Oh, our life expectancy is maybe another 10 or 15 years max. So they were already looking to wind down their careers and see a little bit of... Maybe five years of leisure before their health may start to fail.

And today... Not only the lifespan is a lot longer, but the health span is a lot longer. People are more able to get around. Mobility is a lot better for people.

Despite the fact that a lot of people are struggling financially and need a lot more help. There is a general population of older people that are thriving. And yet they're reaching -- there's a tendency for a lot of people to reach the sort of late career phase in their late 50s and early 60s where they may be kind of done with what they've been doing for the last 20, 25 years. A lot of people are union employees.

They get their 20 years and I can't tell you how many bus drivers, school teachers, folks that we teach that come in, looking for their sort of next act. They're not able... It's not traditionally normal for people in America anyways to then say... Okay.

Now I'm 60 and I'm gonna retire. So I'm gonna go back to... I'm gonna go for a two-year college program now. And enhance my skills for the next phase that I'm gonna do.

I'm particularly interested in woodworking. So if I was gonna do my next phase, I would go take a woodworking and design class to be able to build furniture. That's what I'm interested. But there isn't -- nobody is -- there's not a big swelling of people going to do that and there isn't government funding and loans and Pelle grants designed for people in their 60s.

There are schools that have programs for people that are older and there are older adults that are going back to school, despite the tendency of the oddness of sitting next to a bunch of 25-year-olds in the classroom. But I think it would be a good pattern for us to start building more infrastructure for people to be more intentional about building their skill set for the next phase of life. There's an organization called Modern Elder Academy, that's in Santa Fe and down in Baja California, that does amazing sort of next phase visioning programs for people that are looking for their next kind of project or something to work on.

And there's also stuff around social connection. The data around social engagement for older adults is really pretty stark. So a lot of people -- you see your social networks attenuating, because friends die, you leave the workforce, the workforce relationships start to go, your kids move away, so the parent relationships you might have had start to evaporate or attenuate. So we need to add more energy into building social contact for people, and we don't have systems for it.

It's not like everybody goes to camp in the summer. So we need to find ways to do that. I don't really know the answer to it. But I'm sort of alluding to this notion that we need more social infrastructure.

I could go longer. But I'm not allowed to. Back with a follow-up? We'll go back to online.

We did a one week camp for older people where they made friends using technology, which was really cool. It was called Senior Planet After Hours. We try to do that. It was limited to 12.

But we could do it... I would do it a thousand times if I could. I loved it. Do you have a service or an idea for people to bring in technology, to be used or evaluated sort of like a usability session with any of the...

You mean like something that they already own? Or something that... I guess more like a company or an organization. Yeah, we do.

We have a test bed program. There's a woman named Julia who works out of the DC office of the AARP, and you basically apply for the test bed if you're interested in doing something. We'll look at it, evaluate whether... We think it's... I mean, there's a kind of prima facie... Do we like this thing?

Does it work? And we'll try to fit it in, if we can find a place to test it out, and try that. Yeah. Great.

We'll take a question from the back.

Do you see AI bots or generative AI... Very special LLMs being designed for older people to learn courses and expand the technology infrastructure? To have more people doing your programs? I do.

Yes. So... We have... That is one of our competitive set challenges.

I think the AI bots are... You know, to the extent that... If something is getting solved, then we don't have to solve that. We can focus on something else.

And there's a fairly large kind of landscape of things that we'd like to be working on. So we just did a planning session today. The staff upvoted and downvoted the priorities for the year. And there's just a lot on the table.

So if... An AI bot is gonna come out of the gate and do something that's so fantastic that it's just as good as what we would be doing with a live trainer, I'm happy to cede the ground. So far it hasn't gotten there yet. I've never lost betting against technology.

People thought that a lot of this stuff was gonna be self-solving for years. And that it was gonna get so easy that nobody would have to worry about it. Do you remember interoperability with EHRs? Anybody around for that whole process?

The idea was... We're gonna get... We're gonna digitize medical records. That was 2006.

Right? And everything is gonna get digitized. And now that it's digitized, we're gonna set some standards so that it all talks to itself, and it's gonna be a unified platform. There were health exchanges.

Remember that? I worked a lot on this. There were these health exchanges. Things called HealthEx, still out there, I believe.

They were supposed to draw this data, consumers were gonna be in charge of it. We were gonna control our medical data. And everyone you ever talked to, every doctor was gonna share that, so you could know what your blood pressure was five years ago and what somebody prescribed to you. And you can get... Are you kidding me?

None of that stuff got solved. We're still like... You can't get access to anything. I can barely get my doctor to answer basic questions.

So the technology solution... I'm still waiting for my self-driving car to get me to the Catskills. There's a lot of stuff that hasn't eventuated. I'm not yet worried about getting outcompeted by the tech industry.

Maybe that's an arrogant answer, but that's my experience. On that note, I have a good staff. That's a good place to end tonight's presentation Q and A. Thanks a lot, Tom.

I had a lot of fun. Thanks for having me. Website. OATS.org for corporate.

Senior Planet.org for participants. [email protected] if you have a general question. And I'm on LinkedIn if people want to send me messages. But I'm totally crappy about answering.

So [email protected] and you will get to me. Excellent! I would like to come back some time. This is great.