I'm thrilled to be here today,
and be talking about this really critical issue
of technology in older adults.
I want to do a quick presentation
of just a little bit about the work that we're doing,
but I'll begin just with
a brief snapshot about
myself so that it's not just the PowerPoint,
and what we've been doing at OATS for the last 17 years.
About 17 years ago, 2004,
I got together here in New York City with
a group of other volunteers and activists,
and we started a non-profit organization
that was dedicated to
helping older people learn
how to use technology and get on the Internet.
We worked together for about five or six years,
really just connecting
with community organizations around
New York and developing
different models to help people get engaged,
and it eventually culminated
in a program called Senior Planet,
which is the main framework that we've been
using going forward around aging and technology.
I'm going to show a few slides,
tell the story of that.
Getting right to the point here,
this is a quick timeline of what we've been doing here.
OATS is a non-profit organization,
we are a social impact organization.
Our goal here is not simply
to judge ourselves by whether or not
people are learning technology as a market activity,
but really what we're interested in is making sure that
the work we do has some relevance to aging,
into social outcomes that we're interested in.
Several years ago, about almost 10 years ago now,
we did a strategic plan
with our board of directors and we found
that our mission,
which had been focusing more on technology,
should be adapted to focus more on aging.
Our current mission statement for
the last nearly 10 years is,
we harness the power of
technology to change the way that we age.
That focus has really helped us zero in on the linkages
between teaching and training on
the one hand, and outcome,
such as social determinants
of health and social engagement,
people's health and wellness,
things like sleep patterns, financial security,
civic engagement and participation,
and even creative expression.
We have people doing book clubs and
music events and writing plays and
being active in different kinds of engagements.
When we first started out with
this program all the way back in 2004,
we didn't have our own centers.
We didn't feel that we needed to,
because New York City has 240 senior centers
and there are plenty of operations that
have computer labs and places to work.
But as we got developing with the different models,
we found that there was a need to
showcase what was possible with technology,
so we started the center in
Manhattan called Senior Planet.
Ever since then, our Senior Planet motto has
been to grow these kinds
of technology engagements for older people,
focusing on what we call these five impact areas,
so social engagement, health
and wellness, and such like.
We've actually created before and after surveys
and evaluated the impact of programs,
and use that as a way of building back
more impactful models for
growth and development with our initiatives.
By 2014, we taught over 10,000 classes.
All of our programs are free to the end user,
and a typical engagement would
be between five and 10 weeks.
We target programs for people over the age of 60,
and they would come in
twice a week for five weeks
or twice a week for 10 weeks,
if they were a part of a series of courses.
At the end of that, they would be very successful and
confident using email and Internet,
and being able to activate a device of some sort.
It's typically a PC or an iPad or Chromebook,
and then we develop that course into
five different languages so we teach it.
Our basic courses are in English,
Spanish, Chinese,
Russian and also Bengali.
Recently, we started teaching in Vietnamese
and other translated languages around the country.
A few years ago, we expanded outside of
New York into programs in upstate in a rural area,
which incubated our interest
in focusing on rural older adults.
Then launched programs in San Antonio, Texas,
Palo Alto, California,
and Montgomery County, Maryland.
We were beginning to expand nationally.
Big grants from different foundation funders
and also philanthropic sources
like the Humana Foundation,
enabled us to engage in these growth efforts.
Then very excitingly, this year we affiliated with AARP.
We've gone from being literally
a tiny little program at one location in
Bedford-Stuyvesant with me sitting
in a lab with a bunch
of older adults trying to figure out
what people want to learn and with
a notebook and sketching our curriculum,
to the point today where we have
over 100 staff working around the country.
We're working to develop
a 50 state model with AARP teams around the country,
and we've been able to really make a difference for
actually hundreds of thousands
of people that have come to
the programs and participated in-person and online.
It's really made a big difference
in terms of this footprint here.
Currently, this gives you a sense
of where we started with
our footprint in our initial engagements.
These Senior Planet Centers exist now
in the different locations marked here.
San Antonio actually doesn't have a center yet,
but they will eventually,
and the City of San Antonio just
engaged in a long-term partnership with us,
we're excited about that.
In each of those areas, first of all,
we're next to the older folks that we're working with,
so there's a lot of cool design
going on in the centers and in the labs.
We tend to focus on mainstream devices
and applications so that people are learning,
not just a program that's senior focus,
but also something broader that may have
application that's more mainstream
that their friends and family and neighbors
and people that they're looking
out on television are using.
Then finally, virtually all of the OATS programs are
partnerships with some partner in the community.
With COVID happening like everybody else,
we did what everybody is calling the digital pivot,
where we converted all of our courses
online and since doing that,
we've had phenomenal participation in classes.
We've got health courses that have
over 400 people at a time participating in them all,
we reviewed about 22,000 engagements some months.
Some of those come more than once during the period,
but we're definitely working with
tens of thousands of people around the country.
Our Net Promoter Score on
programs like this has actually gone up too.
Actually, this last month it was a 90.
People are very positive
about the courses they're taking.
We've been doing advocacy work helping build programs
around the country to help people get
access to technology and connectivity,
and the training has been
a central part of everything that we're doing.
On the program impact,
we've done 7,300 virtual programs since COVID started.
We've had 361,000 engagements,
which is people coming on to
the sessions and participating.
We'd been doing capacity building sessions
increasingly with partners around the country,
helping people learn how to use
the digital channels to work
with their partners and their constituents themselves.
That's been very successful.
We're running for the first time
ever a series of programs to license
Senior Planet programs and content to
partners who can help implement it in their communities.
I could talk more about that in a moment.
As I mentioned, we have these five impact areas.
This is a quick snapshot of what they are.
These are all photographs by
the way of actual participants
at Senior Planet programs and our advocacy.
One of the women here is in our entrepreneurship program.
We've done all sorts of work with libraries and museums.
Then our fitness programs where
we've trained thousands of
older adults to get connected
with their bodies and go out,
and even gone to fitness centers in
groups and gotten people able to feel
more safe and comfortable working
exercising in groups and fitness environments.
That's been one of our main programs.
Our morning stretch class has
about 400 people participating per day.
We've been adding recently things on
Tai Chi and Fit Fusion workouts and different things.
We're finding that this wellness and
fitness programming is a real high priority for people.
Once they learn the technology basics,
that's the direction that a lot of people are taking it.
Most recently we've been highlighting
stories of older adults that are fit and active,
and we just had a neat breakthrough
these last couple of two weeks ago.
We sponsor five athletes each year.
They don't have to be very high level
in terms of competitiveness.
Some of them are folks that are recovering from
injury or simply doing something like,
one of them does lawn bowling,
but he's really excited about sharing that with
other people and sharing his fitness journey.
One of our Senior Planet sponsored
athletes got a silver medal in
the World Championships about two weeks ago
in powerlifting, and this is her.
Her name's Abby, and she's
really helping set the standard for people
creating a real positive perspective on
older adults not just being fit,
but also using technology to help evangelize and
share their stories and learn from others as well.
We wrap a lot of technology programming
into the outcomes that we're looking for.
Recently, we asked people what they
were doing with Internet,
why it was important to them during the quarantine?
Of course, lots of people said Zoom,
but interestingly, we got a lot of
people talking about connections with friends and family.
A lot of people talked about exercise classes,
but roughly equal numbers talked about going
to church services and being spiritual online.
Many people asked about
vaccination information and news,
lots of people doing Facebook,
but not quite as many as some of
these other elements, and cultural events.
Then there's really a whole range of other activities,
online banking, shopping,
social activities, and things like that.
We're finding a real diversity of
activities of people participating in online.
Then most recently, we sponsor a thing called
Aging Connected supported by the Humana Foundation.
It's a national effort to get older people
signed up for the Internet at home.
We did a research report and we found
that large numbers of older people are not
participating at the same rates as
the younger population in terms of
using different types of technology.
Internet use is lower,
most of these elements are 20 to almost 30
percent lower in terms of participation by older adults.
Particularly the broadband gap at
home is something that we're zeroing in on.
Fifty-eight percent of older people in
America have Internet at home,
which means that 42 percent do not.
Of that group, that's about
21.8 million people that are currently
still needing to get broadband
at home in order to participate in
the initiatives that so many people are
using in their daily lives.
We've been advocating around the country to
get people more active about this,
and also showcasing that
they are equity issues
where a lot of the people that are not
online are disproportionately
Medicaid enrollees or people with
functional impairments or people that have
they'll report frequently depressive symptoms,
all more likely to be off the Internet and
need help getting online at home.
There are all these elements around
demographics and race and
income and rural residents
that tend to predict people being offline,
and it's become a real social justice challenge for
people to close that digital divide for older adults.
Obviously, COVID has magnified the impact of this,
because so many of the people that have
passed away from COVID obviously are older,
but connectivity and the lack of
access to information and support through
digital channels makes it harder for
people and harder for people to stay safe.
We identified a series of paths forward.
Obviously, helping people
learn about the value of broadband,
expanding access to low-cost offers.
There are new subsidy programs available,
the Emergency Broadband Benefit,
and other sources of resources for older people to get
online in many cases with government funding and support.
Also prioritizing the social equity components of this,
and helping other communities
out there develop content and support
localized efforts to bring people
online and support people when they go online.
For people that want to get in touch,
here's a quick rundown of
ways to connect with Senior Planet,
just so that you can find us online.
SeniorPlanet.org is the best place
to start if you're looking for programming.
Again, all of our programs are free.
They're generally targeted at people over the age of 60,
although we get many people
between the ages of 50 and 60 to participate,
and we get people all the way up into
over 100 years old that have participated in programs.
You'll find a real range of things on SeniorPlanet.org.
But classes are there,
book clubs, programming,
it's a great place to start.
Learning more about OATS the organization,
you can take a peek at OATS.org and learn about
our licensing program if there are people in
communities that want to get involved,
different kinds of client projects that we do,
and learn more about the affiliation with
AARP and how that's been developing.
Then the Aging Connected Initiative
is helping people get online,
and we do have tech hotlines
available for people that need
direct support and referrals
in terms of what to do while they're
trying to connect to the Internet.
That's pretty much the story that I want to share.
Thank you, folks, for listening to that.