Front Porch, an AgeTech Collaborative™ business service participant, is a dynamic nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering individuals to live connected and fulfilled lives through community and innovation. As one of Front Porch’s social connection programs, Well Connected focuses on offering a wide range of virtual programs that build community, creating spaces where older adults can explore, laugh, learn and share experiences, forming meaningful relationships along the way.
We sat down with Amber Carroll, senior director of the Front Porch connection programs, to talk about Well Connected’s mission and programming, how it developed a bespoke tech solution to extend its reach to older adults, and — in the spirit of National Volunteer Month — about the power of Well Connected’s participants and volunteers.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Can you tell us about Front Porch and Well Connected?
Well Connected is part of Front Porch, a nonprofit organization that’s dedicated to empowering individuals to live connected and fulfilled lives. Most of that work is done in brick-and-mortar housing communities, including affordable housing, market-rate communities and tiered level-of-care life plan communities.
Front Porch has a Community Services division that addresses four key issues: housing, nutrition, creative engagement and social connection. Well Connected and Well Connected Español are two of those social connection programs — they are virtual activity programs for older adults living in the United States. Anybody over the age of 60 who speaks English (or Spanish, for Well Connected Español) can join the Well Connected programs as a participant or volunteer. Between the two, we have virtual programming that’s available 12 hours a day, 365 days a year.
How can people access your content?
People can join online or on their phones. It was especially important for us to have a platform that allows our participants and volunteers to easily join by phone, if that’s what they needed or wanted to do. For example, about 40% of our participants don’t have access to broadband internet. So we built this really cool, accessible conferencing platform called Abiento, which allows people to easily join with their phones.
Virtual programming isn’t unique anymore, but we’ve been around for 21 years, so we were ahead of the curve in understanding the value of virtual connection. What we’ve seen lacking in this rapid growth of virtual programming is the accessibility piece — that’s why we built Abiento.
What kind of programs does Well Connected offer?
You could name pretty much any topic, and we are doing it, will do it or have done it already. But, loosely speaking, we break our programs into two categories. The first is engagement, where participants come together, usually in small groups of about 12 people, to talk about topics of interest. Every group is led by a trained facilitator, most of whom are also participants in other programs; we really love it when older adults volunteer to share their passions and skills with others. These events are intentionally designed to help people engage with each other in meaningful conversation.
The other category is what we call our lifelong learning groups, where we bring in experts to talk about their area of expertise. For example, we partner with museums all over the country who offer docent-led art tours. Or if we’re doing an event on the theme of health and wellness, we might bring in an expert to talk about Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.
You mentioned many of your participants also volunteer to lead some of your programs. Can you say more about that?
All of our programming is 100% led by volunteers. For the Well Connected programs, we break our volunteers into two categories: presenters and facilitators.
Presenters are the people who lead the lifelong learning groups. Those are typically a one-and-done presentation: For example, someone might put together a slide show to talk about a cool new product they’ve discovered that they want to share with others. On the other hand, facilitators lead what tend to be groups that meet regularly. For example, someone might lead a group about woodworking once a month, or once a week for six weeks — it’s really flexible. We offer training to both presenters and facilitators, though facilitators have the option of getting ongoing support.
We also have volunteers that do things like pack envelopes with handouts. Really, we wouldn’t exist if we didn’t have so many amazing volunteers.
If your own participants also volunteer to lead or facilitate groups, they must really love the programs.
I recently received a note from one of our volunteers that read, “I came to Well Connected on the darkest night of my life. Little does that Well Connected staff person that I connected with know that she saved my life that night. Since that night 11 years ago, I’ve been a member, a participant and a facilitator of five different groups, and I’ve made so many friendships that I otherwise would never have had the chance to make. I love Well Connected.”
That’s really powerful!
It is! And the power of volunteerism is well known. Some years ago, there was even a study that looked at the connection between volunteerism and healthy grieving. It showed that volunteering even just a couple of hours a week helps to make the grieving process much healthier because it gives people a sense of purpose.
We really care about meaningful social connection, and the lovely thing is that so many people call us or write us cards to tell us how much they appreciate our programs. I don’t even like to think about them as “programs,” but more as venues where people can truly connect in meaningful ways.
What’s up next for Front Porch and Well Connected?
We’ve been essentially cold-calling various companies and saying, “You have a really cool solution. Would you like to share it with older adults across the country through Well Connected?” Now that we’re a part of the AgeTech Collaborative, we’d love to partner with other companies in the Collaborative to bring their technology and solutions to older adults.
For example, it’s important to include the voices of the people you are creating solutions for in the design of that solution. And our participants are a diverse population that would be terrific for focus groups for Collaborative companies — they're a vocal group of people, and they will tell you what they think!
Some companies in the AgeTech Collaborative have done presentations on Well Connected already, but I’m eager to jump in and get more involved, and we’d love to talk with anyone who’s interested in partnering with Well Connected to expand their reach to older adults.
To get in touch with Front Porch and Well Connected, participants in the AgeTech Collaborative can contact Amber Carroll through the Collaborative platform. To learn more about the organization, visit the Front Porch and Well Connected websites.
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