coloradosun.com · 9 hours ago

As Rapidly Aging Colorado Confronts Social isolation, Du Students Join Nationwide Effort to Bridge the Gap - the Colorado Sun

Through Perfect Pair, a nonprofit matching college students with older adults, a graduate student researches her match's favorite sports team before each visit, a pianist plays "Yesterday" for a memory care ward, and a chapter president tends friendships she describes as being done "in honor of her grandmother's legacy." What began as one Michigan student's intuition - that her college friends and the residents she'd come to love might genuinely need each other - has grown into 26 chapters across 17 states, quietly dismantling the assumption that loneliness is simply the price of aging or of being young and far from home. "There's just a lot more similarities than differences across ages that I feel like people don't really know about," says founder Emily Lerner, who hasn't missed a weekly phone call with her original match even after leaving school. One student volunteer, surprised by what she found across generations, put it plainly: interacting with older adults has made her "feel a little bit less existential about the whole thing, because there's so much beauty in that chapter, even though so many of us fear it." What this program keeps uncovering, visit by visit, is something both simple and easy to forget - that people, at almost any age, are mostly just looking for someone willing to show up.