Summary: What Your Church, Your Y, and Your Library Can Do

Janet Kowalski has been the branch manager of the Eastside branch of the Cedar Falls Public Library for fourteen years. She thinks about older adults constantly because they are the largest daytime population in her building and the population whose needs are growing fastest while being served least well by the technology that is reshaping everything around them.

Janet did three specific things that turned her library branch into something more. She trained her staff in digital literacy for seniors, she connected the library’s broadband and quiet spaces to the tutoring and earning platforms described in Series 16, and she partnered with the local YMCA and two congregations to cross-refer older adults to the programs each institution offers. The library became the local bridge between the technology and the population.

Community institutions are not investors in the financial sense. They are social infrastructure. The YMCA that hosts intergenerational programming where retired professionals do structured knowledge sessions with early-career workers. The church that provides its fellowship hall for community engagement. The library that provides the broadband, the digital literacy training, and the quiet space where Sandra tutors students in South Korea. The community college that partners with the purpose deployment model for workforce development. These institutions exist in every community. They have physical space, community trust, programming infrastructure, and in the case of libraries and YMCAs, public funding. What they lack is the connection to the technology platforms that would extend their programming into the care coordination, knowledge capture, and earning infrastructure the publication has described.

The reader who shows up at the Y board meeting and asks about partnering with a care technology platform for intergenerational programming is deploying civic capital. The reader who tells her librarian she needs help learning a video tutoring platform so she can teach from the library is using existing infrastructure for the earning concierge use case. Neither requires permission from the technology industry. Both require showing up.

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