Vida Senior Centers

Vida Senior Centers has been supporting low-income Hispanic seniors in the Washington DC area for more than 50 years.  Aging brings challenges for all of us,  income challenges, health challenges, cognitive challenges, but imagine having to face all those challenges in a country that is linguistically and culturally foreign to you. Vida's clients are mostly elderly women. They stem from 25 central and south American countries. They are mostly single, widowed or divorced,  women who have worked hard all their lives at low paying jobs and now face old age displaced, poor and mostly alone.  They see Vida Senior Centers as their safe haven, their home away from home, a place where they meet others just like them, where they can speak Spanish, enjoy dancing, knitting, singing,  try Zumba and Yoga, where they can take English lessons, learn computer skills, mount cooking  competitions and argue endlessly about the specific beauties of their native countries.  But mostly it is a place where they can feel safe and where they always can find someone to help them. COVID-19 has closed both Vida Centers in March.  Vida has found ways to get food to the seniors, but isolation and loneliness are taking their toll on the population.  Vida is seeking funds to move the support of these seniors from closed buildings to the wide open internet, buy tablets and data plans for the those among them  in need of communication devices,  teach all of them current technology in Spanish and create a community for them -- an internet Hispanic home, a place where they can always feel welcome  and where they understand that it is their adopted country that appreciates them, helps them and looks after them.