There's a patch of land in Rock Island, Illinois, right next to Friendship Manor — a senior living community where people have been aging in place for decades. And soon, right beside it, there will be a 33,000-square-foot childcare center. Not by accident. By design.
Friendship Manor and SAL Community Services are building what they call a "Friendship Neighborhood" — a place where seniors and children as young as six weeks old will share their days. Reading together. Making art. Gardening. Telling stories. The kinds of things that don't require anyone to be a certain age, only willing to be present.
Ted Pappas Jr., Friendship Manor's CEO, puts it simply: the way to fight the three plagues of aging — loneliness, helplessness, and boredom — is to bring children, animals, and plants into seniors' lives. Not as visitors. As neighbors. The center will serve up to 192 children, and the intergenerational programs will be woven into the fabric of every day, not reserved for special occasions.
It's only the third campus like this in Illinois, and one of roughly 105 in the entire country. But for the people of Rock Island, the numbers matter less than the feeling — that someone looked at a senior home and a childcare center and thought, these belong together. That care doesn't have to be sorted by age. That a toddler learning to hold a crayon and a grandmother remembering how to laugh at a mess might be exactly what the other one needs.