Reflections on Age Friendly Teaneck’s 2026 Summer Internship

By Ellen Rand

At Age Friendly Teaneck, we start thinking about summer in March. It’s not visions of sand and surf that dance in our heads. Rather, it’s the time of year when we start organizing our four-week summer Exploring Careers in Aging internship for four rising high school juniors and seniors.

The idea of the internship began with a team discussion in 2018, spearheaded by The Bright Side Family founder and executive director Elizabeth Davis: Could we encourage young adults to think about careers centering on providing services to an elder population? And at the same time, could we counteract the stereotypes about aging that persist in our culture, by connecting interns with elders in a variety of residential settings? And could we find private funding for such a plan so that we’d be competitive in the summer job market?

The answer to those questions was yes and except for a two-year hiatus in 2020 and 2021 because of the pandemic, we’ve been doing this program since the summer of 2018. Our seventh internship group  -- Adelyn, Alicja, Connor and Mylani -- ‘graduated’ on July 31. For me, as for our Age Friendly Team – EJ Vizzi, director of senior programs for The Bright Side Family; Colleen Diskin, communications director; Janice Dorman, Age Friendly Teaneck coordinator; Alexandra Valdivia, Bright Side’s community programs manager; and myself (the volunteer of the group), it’s always a bittersweet day, because we have to let them go after a very busy four weeks.

How busy? Every day is full, and each day is different from the next. I always liken the program’s scheduling to putting together a giant jigsaw puzzle (not to mention the logistics of getting the interns from Point A to Point B). Those tasks fall largely to the undaunted EJ Vizzi. The four weeks consist of visits and activities at independent living, assisted living communities and senior centers in Teaneck and elsewhere in Bergen County; Lunch and Learn sessions with more than a half dozen professionals in health care, law, architecture, geriatrics, social work,  technology and advocacy; watching several films dealing with relevant issues in aging and discussing them afterward; and researching a project of each of the interns’ choosing, culminating in a presentation to an audience of family members, program partners and civic leaders on ‘graduation’ day.

What did this year’s interns like best about the program? They all said it was the opportunity to visit and connect with elder residents in various settings, talking with them, finding common ground with them, learning about who they are as individuals.

 I’ve had the privilege of working on this internship since it started. Besides reviewing applications and interviewing prospective interns with another member of the team, I’m also involved with selecting our four interns – always a very tough choice! I’ve also encouraged a few professionals to do “Lunch and Learn” sessions with our interns, and they have been with the program now for several years.  It’s always gratifying to see interns asking lots of questions and sharing their stories with the professionals (and vice versa)! I also screen the films, both documentary and fiction, and it fascinates me to see how each intern reacts differently to the stories we show.

It shouldn’t surprise me that some issues resonate with some while others are drawn to completely different topics. After all, as we keep stressing in our discussions, elders are all unique and as different from one another as the adolescents on the interns’ peer group are.

Those differences become clearer in the variety of topics the interns choose for their projects, when Colleen Diskin and I help in narrowing down their topics to a manageable level, suggesting a variety of resources to look into and guiding them as they rehearse their presentations. This year, presentations included an impassioned case for why our culture should better understand Alzheimer’s; a reckoning with an intern’s own biases about aging; the importance of social connection and how we can help foster it; and a look at the ongoing state of age discrimination in the job market.

There’s a lot to love about the internship for me, besides the sheer fun of being with young people: how we all get to know each other over the course of the program, for example.  And how impressive it is that these young adults already have a sense of their own agency. And how in many instances they have faced challenges that I certainly had not experienced at their age. And how it feels when the interns take to heart something that we’ve said, or shown them, or suggested to them.

We also talk a lot about the importance of living with a sense of meaning and purpose, no matter how old we are. It is, after all, one of the pillars of good health. I can say that this program is a big part of what gives my life meaning and purpose. And it’s why I’m glad to start thinking about it anew every March.