The Intergenerational Life History Project: promoting health and reducing disease in adolescents and elders

A 38-week Intergenerational Life History Project is designed to create a collaboration in a lower socioeconomic neighborhood between 50 elderly people in the community ages 80 and older (whose life reminiscences make them historians) and 50 high school seniors (who become scribes by writing down the elders' oral histories.) The youth-elder teams provide reciprocal social support and intergenerational mentorship through reminiscence. The project is an integrated, multifaceted effort to bring about health, behavior, and attitude changes in the two age cohorts challenged in different ways and for different reasons by morbidity and mortality.