EngAGE Stories

EngAGE CEO/Founder Tim Carpenter was the recipient of a 2016/17 Stanton Fellowship from the Durfee Foundation. The Stanton Fellowship allows leaders to test a hunch and to leverage their knowledge and contacts, with the goal of improving the lives of people living in Los Angeles. Stanton Fellows are the most knowledgeable, inquisitive, and highly networked leaders in their fields – the ones who are best positioned to identify and make headway on a big question.

Here are Tim’s thoughts summarizing the two-year experience:

The Challenge — The thorny issue I sought to address was to find the next big idea in senior housing – to fuse housing, environmental design, and programs to achieve higher engagement, behavior change, sense of community, and sense of purpose for elders.

The Hunch — I would find the solution outside the US and it would be a model that already exists in senior housing and the provision of aging services.

The Proposal — I wanted to focus on models from other countries, and to have time to write about my findings in retreat from work. I set meetings in each place with government officials, universities, thought leaders, NGOs, developers, architects, aging industry leaders, media, artists, cultural leaders, and others.

The Stanton Journey — I traveled to New Zealand, Italy, the Netherlands, and Ireland with Fellowship funds (due to speaking engagements during the fellowship, I also was in Singapore, Canada, and many US states), and also took two week-long writing and research retreats. My path changed early on when I started meeting with people in New Zealand and I became more interested in finding ways to create community across all ages as a way to address my inquiry challenge. I realized that community happens in a place like New Zealand (and all of the other countries I visited), not just for seniors but for everyone, because of an adherence to culture, mythology, belief, and a feeling that you are part of something larger than yourself. This struck me as what is lacking in senior housing, and in many ways, in our communities, our cities, our towns. It made me think that the buildings we help create and the programs we provide are a good step in the right direction, but not enough. We needed to play a larger role in communities, in neighborhoods, amongst the people who lived in these places. It is about PLACE and it is about PEOPLE. During my travels, I see that an intentional linkage of public and private space, a place that offers people somewhere to go, and more importantly a reason to stay, to be there, succeeds. People. That’s the prize, right? People bring people. What do people want? Comfort, greenery, water, walkability, ARTS, culture, a respect for history and neighborhood, education, fun, food, parks, views, a sense of connection and community, a sensory connection to the human spirit. We want all ages, curiosity and diversity and open acceptance of who we are. We want outside the box use of space to create a sense of place, of purpose and belonging. We want gardens and, did I mention the arts? Music, dance, visual art, performance. We want to smile and look around and see others smiling. We want accidental spill-over between our circle of life to inhabit and infect the circles of others, to feel part of something larger than ourselves. Connection. We can design buildings and places but it’s only the hardware. We are the software.

Where You Are Now — My work, and frankly my life, has been forever altered by this experience as a Stanton Fellow. As a result of this two-year journey, the work of EngAGE, my work, has changed. We have changed our design methods in the buildings we have in development with our partners to more carefully curate the public and private spaces to better match the people that will live there. We have expanded from seniors-only into all-ages multigenerational communities. We have also begun to work more closely and carefully with community partners to make sure our communities and programs are integrated fully into the tapestry of the neighborhood and those that live there. As a most recent example, we entered into a partnership with a developer to purchase and operate a free-standing cultural facility in NE Portland (the Alberta Abbey) to further our ability to affect that neighborhood with our affordable housing and programs, and to breathe life back into what was once the traditional African American community there through housing, arts, culture, and true community collaboration. EngAGE will be the curator of programs and engagement for not only the housing, but the neighborhood curator – creating collaborations between cultural orgs, residents, businesses, and the spaces in between, to create a sense of purpose and community at large. EngAGE now helps developers and development teams create community, not just buildings. My Stanton Fellowship will live on, and it infuses everything we now do at EngAGE.

2016 June – New Zealand

Auckland

Auckland

Wellington

Wellington Botanic Gardens

2017 April – The Netherlands

“There is a Dutch quality known as Gezellig, which roughly translates to convivial or cozy. It’s easier experienced than defined, but it’s like time stops, and there’s an intimacy with where you are, right now. The colors, the water, the scents, the breeze, making it possible for life at all ages to simply connect, to be, to be alive. We can create community for all ages, with purpose and authenticity.”

Amsterdam

Amsterdam

2017 July – Italy

Venice

“Thinking about place and the part it plays in our lives. Walking after dinner last night to the public gardens here, we passed an older man reading in his window. Two buildings were connected by an interior courtyard and there was art everywhere. All the people we saw were older. The man’s window looked out onto the Grand Canal and he had a glimpse of the Adriatic if he leaned out a bit. The place beautifully balanced connection and solitude. Walking back after exploring the gardens by the sea, I caught a glimpse through the man’s window again. His wife had returned and she was tossing a salad while he opened a bottle of wine. Three other residents, all older and dressed eclectically, all colorful scarves and berets and beards and wildly large hair, arrived for what was surely a Friday night dinner party. When I was a child, sneaking a peak from the adjacent racetrack, I caught glimpses of artists convening at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY, a colony of like-minded seekers, and thought, hmm, wouldn’t that be a cool place to have a conversation over dinner. This little enclave made me feel that same sense of connection and purpose, excitement, joy. Place… and how it brings together people – designing this in advance, with intention, I think we’d have something.”

Venice

2017 November – Ireland

“Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.” – George Bernard Shaw

Dublin

Galway

2018 January – Los Angeles, Making a Memory Book

“My brother (Johng Ho Song) and sisters (Helmi Hisserich, Hilda Maldonado, Kerry Harrington Morrison, Leslie Ito), the 2016-2017 Stanton Fellows of Durfee LA. Thanks to book artist Sue Ann Robinson, and Durfee’s Claire Peeps and Carrie Avery for a great day making memory books of our amazing experiences together. Seems like yesterday we all started on this adventure.”