Innovative Multigenerational Housing Community Provides Foster Families and Elders a New Opportunity
Over the past two years, the WNC Health Policy Initiative has held several listening and working sessions relating to the needs and challenges facing aging adults, children in the foster care system, and those seeking affordable housing in WNC. In a recent “Brief But Spectacular” segment, PBS News shares the story of Bridge Meadows, a multigenerational housing community in Oregon that offers a new model for how we can address such seemingly disparate and unconnected issues in an intersectional and supportive way that offers benefits to the entire community.
Inspired by the book Hope Meadows by Wes Smith, Bridge Meadows was founded around a vision of “A world where every child has a home and family, every parent has the resources to thrive, and every elder is cherished.“
The result is an intentional living community that brings elders and kinship-foster families together with trauma-informed clinical staff, support services and high-quality affordable housing to create a mutually-supportive environment that offers social, wellness, financial, independent living and other benefits
For example, families provide rides to help elder residents get to medical appointments, while elders watch children so a foster parents can get some much-needed time together, and everyone comes together to engage in social events or other shared activities. As a result, elders are able to stay engaged and independent as they age, foster parents have the support they need to provide the best home possible to their family, and the children benefit from living and growing up in a safe, stable, and loving environment surrounded by caring adults of all ages.
Designed to reduce isolation, provide permanency to foster children struggling with trauma, and promote healthy, independent living among residents while supporting lifelong relationships across generational and socioeconomic divides, Bridge Meadows is a model that certainly bears closer examination as we think about how we address similar needs and opportunities here in Wester North Carolina.
