By Janice M. Bonsu
Every Saturday for four months, I laced up my sneakers for a two-hour program called “Dance for Health: Active Body, Active Mind,” where older adults came together to engage in physical and intergenerational activity to promote brain health.
Usually, these Saturdays were spent learning line dances like the Bop and Charleston — dances that, as a 23-year-old, I was learning for the first time — in an effort to increase participants’ physical activity and, therefore, help preserve cognitive health. But the surprise beneficiaries turned out to be the high school students who participated in monthly intergenerational activities. These students showed up hoping to learn about cooking and gardening; they left with a roadmap for healthy aging.