Vida Senior Centers

Vida Senior Centers has been supporting low-income seniors struggling to age in place in the Washington DC area, for more than 50 years. The seniors are mostly but not exclusively Hispanic.  All live at or below the poverty line. 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, single, widowed or divorced.  They stem from 26 central and South American countries.  They 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  beauties of their specific native countries.  But mostly it is a place where they can feel safe and where they can always find someone to help them. COVID-19 closed on-site programs for the seniors 15 months ago. After  more than a year of social  isolation, food insecurity, and fear of the virus, Vida has been able to reopened  both senior centers. Unfortunately only a limited number of seniors can participate on-site.  While more than 80% of Vida participants are fully vaccinated, lack of the necessary space for social distancing and the ongoing danger the virus and its mutations represents to the elderly, will force the majority of clients to continue to receive services  only via the web and via streaming.  Fifty years of focus on on-site programs have left Vida with great gaps in the organization's technology infrastructure. From cables to computers, from computers to servers, from streaming ability to broadband capacity, Vida is desperate for technological upgrades. While we have been able to secure technology equipment for the seniors, our own ability to reliably deliver programs still lags behind.  Vida's seniors have been left behind too often during their lives, let us not leave them once again on the wrong side of the digital divide.