Interconnected Evolution: 2026 Creative Aging Symposium Recap
Interconnected Evolution: 2026 Annual Creative Aging Symposium a collaboration from Front Porch Communities and Services’ programs Creative Spark, Ruth’s Table and Front Porch Gallery.
For nine years, our Creative Engagement team has been hosting the Creative Aging Symposium (CAS) virtually with a variety of guest speakers, teachers, and thought-leaders to explore the place where aging meets creativity. This year we wanted to celebrate the transformational power of creation in groups. We welcomed speakers and programs that are innovating the way we create and the way we connect to others. With interactive offerings from our gallery partners as a framework, we featured Creative Juices Arts’ facilitator Chris Zydel, Well Connected teachers Gayle Wanamaker and Macarena Pena, the Center for Innovation and Wellbeing, and resident poet Sally L. Saunders. We had 70 virtual attendees including senior living communities, senior artists, teaching artists, caregivers and elder care professionals!
Opening the symposium, Sally L. Saunders read her poems showcasing her feelings about and experiences of healthy aging. The joy was palpable as Sally used word play and a spark of mischief to describe her ever evolving relationship with her aging body and what it means to be an older adult navigating healthcare, friendships, and creativity. She was the perfect lead up to the irrepressible Chris Zydel of Creative Juices Arts! Chris is a veteran intuitive painting facilitator of 40 years and shared generously about what she calls “The Predictable Miracle” that happens when people get together and create. Without fail, Chris finds that when time, space, and intention is created for a group of folks to be wildly expressive, the transformation comes, energy shifts, and immense joy becomes available.
Following Chris’s brilliance, Melisa Mottola of Well Connected welcomed their facilitators Gayle and Macarena to talk about their successes and challenges in hosting virtual creative groups that increase accessibility for older adults living at home. They both described the unexpected bonds of friendship and support that come about in a virtual creative space, decreasing loneliness and expanding enriching life experiences for older adults of all cognitive and physical capabilities. Especially for Macarena, Well Connected Espanol is a platform for her to reach out to other visually impaired artists and create a flourishing community. Both Gayle and Macarena are shining examples of resilience and creative problem solving in order to keep creating and to gather other creatives together to become a force of nature.
We also witnessed the intergenerational success of the Center for Innovation and Wellbeing’s (CIW) Gaming to Connect program. Wesley Warren shared with us that this games based innovation connects college age students to older adults for table top games in order to build trust and relationship that ramps up to video games like Wii Bowling and Trivia on Kahoot. What fun we had playing a game together despite the distance! It’s exciting to see how fun and play can be shared between generations in order to create empathy and understanding between age groups that may otherwise rarely interact in meaningful ways.
My greatest takeaways from this year’s symposium was a sense of the grit and courage it takes to keep creating no matter what. And how “The Predictable Miracle” only happens when we show up and devote ourselves to a creative practice. Most poignantly, the symposium reinforced my own experience of the magnificent power of a group of humans who come together with purpose, freedom, and the absolute permission to create the world in which they want to live. Every year I walk away inspired and joyful, but this year I am also grounded, powerful, and faithful to my inner knowing that there is nothing that a creative group with good intentions can’t accomplish to change thier own lives and the world for the better.