TimeSlips - Connecting Through Creativity

In a time when we deny aging and isolate our elders, TimeSlips provides hope and improves quality of life through creativity and meaningful connection. Creative Care: The Wisconsin Project is a collaborative project focusing on meaningful engagement opportunities as a powerful and joyful way to connect with elders experiencing cognitive challenges. The multi-phase effort fosters partnerships between cultural institutions, elder care systems and higher education programs throughout Wisconsin to provide inspiration for imaginative conversations, stories and activities with our elders. Inspirational narrative sessions are held in elder care homes to engage and influence imagination and creativity in the lives of residents. To stimulate participation in group storytelling meetings, trained facilitators offer playful pictures collected from Wisconsin museums, libraries and art centers to serve as prompts for creative feedback. Coordinators ask open-ended questions about the images and record the responses of the elders, which are a mixture of memories and imagination.These collective dialogues are then transcribed into full, imaginative stories and transformed into a large, interactive artists book. The imagery and text of the books reflect themes from the prompts that had been given as well as the inventive anecdotes we receive from the storytelling sessions. The book will be involved in and partnered with a performance as it is exhibited across the country. It is the goal, through these collaborative sessions and implementation of the cross-sector training process in many cares facilities statewide, to improve the well being of the elders by infusing creativity into care relationships and systems. Research suggests that integrating creative strategies for making meaningful connections increases the quality and quantity of engagement between staff and residents