At the Intersection of Aging, Community and Research

This article is authored by Anthony Kupferschmidt, the recipient of our 2023 Community-Engaged Partnership Award. Anthony is now the Strategic Lead, Aging and Older Persons at the City of Vancouver.

I have been interested in aging since I was a teenager. One of my first jobs in high school was maintaining the building and grounds of a care home. I quickly found myself more interested in interacting with the residents, and I shifted into a role leading recreational programs. Over my career, I have had the pleasure of working in hospital and research settings, memory clinics, municipalities, and with not-for-profit organizations focused on older adults. I moved to Vancouver to complete a Master of Arts in the SFU Department of Gerontology, and later was the Executive Director of two different senior centres in Metro Vancouver.

I have always had a strong interest in research, and I prioritized engaging the agencies I was leading as community partners in several projects with researchers from multiple institutions. Independent, not-for-profit senior centres like the West End Seniors’ Network and the Langley Senior Resources Society where I worked are driven by their membership of older adults, and it is important that they have the opportunity to participate meaningfully in research. This doesn’t just mean having the chance to respond to surveys, but also helping to co-create research questions, and to have research findings shared back with the community so that the relationship between researchers and older adults is not extractive but rather mutually beneficial. This is the embodiment of community-engaged research.

Sometimes researchers attempting to recruit study participants through senior centres also don’t consider the agency itself. A request to “help identify older adults who would like to be interviewed” takes valuable (limited) time and resources away from program and service delivery. Often these requests fail to consider compensation for the organization as a collaborator. For research to be truly engaged with community, it needs to recognize the value of community partners to support recruitment and identify real-life challenges worthy of research with funds for staff time and ads in agency communication channels such as newsletters, websites and social media. Funding agencies need to mandate dollars for participating community agencies, and researchers need to build these requests into their grant application budgets.

With very little research about senior centres themselves in BC and Canada, this sector has also struggled to articulate the impact it has on the lives of older adults. Actively partnering with researchers can help translate the good work senior centres do into greater understanding among decision-makers and funders. With that in mind, I embarked on a collaboration with Dr. Andrew Wister, the Director of the SFU Gerontology Research Centre, Dr. Laura Kadowaki and Andrea Wadman focused on the role of senior centres in promoting the health and wellbeing of older adults. This project was funded by a Convening and Collaborating (C2) Award from Michael Smith Health Research BC, and culminated in a report entitled Independent Senior Centres: Connecting and Supporting Older Adults in Metro Vancouver. Together we identified challenges, opportunities and potential strategies to ensure senior centres are able to continue to meet the health and social needs of older adults into the future, and co-developed a research agenda for senior centres with community partners. This research has raised the profile of senior centres in BC, and the findings were even featured in an op-ed in the Vancouver Sun.

More recently, I have been inspired by how the 411 Seniors Centre Society has created a Community Research Hub with a Collective of Older Adult Researchers (COAR) to involve its members as co-researchers rather than just participants. 411 was one of many senior centres that contributed to the project above, and they have closely collaborated with the SFU Science and Technology for Aging Research Institute (STAR). This approach lays a strong foundation for community-engaged research in this sector, and I hope that both researchers and other senior-serving organizations will take steps to meaningfully involve older adults in research.