How Workplace Ageism Harms Us All

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins 00:08
Hello and welcome to The Art of aging, part of the abundant aging podcast series from United Church homes. On this show, we look at what it means to age in America and in other places around the world with positive and empowering conversations, challenge and encourage and inspire all to age with abundance. I am so excited because Janine Vanderburg is with us today. Janine is committed to slaying the hashtag ageism dragon and her capacity as writer, trader and consultant, she worked with changing the narrative a leading anti ageism initiative based in Colorado, and after six, well, we’re a little over six years as the founder and director, she moved into the role of senior strategist and master trainer. Janine was one of the original 12 individuals to be certified as a master trainer by FrameWorks Institute in 2017 and she continues to be involved in this work. In 2022 she led hundreds of workshops and gave presentations in the US for people in all 50 states and 43 additional countries. She is also an encore champion, and she was one of our keynote speakers at our very own ninth annual symposium held just a few weeks ago. Welcome back, Janine, it’s great to be with you.

Janine Vanderburg 01:27
Beth, it’s great to see you again. That symposium was so much fun.

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins 01:31
Yeah, it was great having you here. Just a reminder that this podcast series is sponsored by United Church homes. Ruth frost Parker center for abundant aging. To learn more about the center, including our annual symposium, which we’re already planning for next year. You can visit www dot united, church homes.org, backslash, Parker dash center. So Janine, why don’t we start? I’m just really curious what originally brought you into this, the middle of this social movement, this age is in space. So

Janine Vanderburg 02:05
Bev up. That’s such a great question, because I often think I can’t pinpoint an exact time, but one of the things that I know is this, and it was 2006. It was right before the Great Recession. I was asked by a group of foundations to lead a study in Colorado about what it was at the time that people, age 55, and over, were thinking about what’s next. And we did all of these focus groups and surveys and key informant interviews. And one of the things that I realized, and that came out of the study, was how much as we got older, people were thinking differently about this phase of life, maybe differently than what our parents had or what our grandparents had. And that was kind of exciting, right? It was like the emergence of the Encore movement. Mark Friedman had published his book, so there was excitement about that. So speed up a year and a half, and we’ve got the Great Recession, and all of a sudden I am talking to people through my consulting firm in their 50s and 60s who’ve been pushed out, who have all the skills and facing for the first time, serious unemployment, seeing their retirement and everything kind of fade away in front of them. And it just occurred to me that we didn’t have really good ideas about what it meant as we got older, if we weren’t living the way that our parents and our grandparents have. What do you do if you’re expecting you’re going to continue working and be involved in the community? So what happened was I had an opportunity, so then we sped up about 10 years. I’m still running my social sector consulting firm. So I ran a firm for about three decades that worked with leading change makers around the US on community and social change. So foundations, people who are starting non profits, starting social movements. So I had an OP. I have always had this bias for social change, and this opportunity arose to become part of this age movement. And I was initially hesitant because it seemed like a really big thing, and I should have gone with that original hesitation, because it is a really big thing, as you well know. But I kept remembering all of the people my age who wanted to do things, who wanted to continue to be involved, who had so many gifts to give, and who were kind of being pushed aside, and that just seemed wrong. I was someone who had always been involved in women’s rights, supported early childhood education, all in the same idea that, you know, all of us have this great human potential, and we should be allowed to use our strengths and talents, and somehow, there wasn’t that opportunity. So that’s it. Kind of how I got in, and once I got in and started changing the narrative with my co-founder, Therese Ellery, in 2018 there kind of was no going back. I mean, these stories that I hear, and continue to hear every day, about ageism, how it plays out, not just in employment, but how we’re treated in health care, how we’re treated in everyday interactions, and honestly, very often, how we treat ourselves, maybe feel compelled to do something about it. So here I am, here you are,

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins 05:33
and an influence for many and influence for more than you. You know, actually, I did not mention, when we were together, that I attended a workshop that you did in 2019 that the Dayton foundation sponsored . It was a day-long event because we had just been awarded our own Del Mar on core fellow through the Dayton Foundation, and Eric and I were both there. So

Janine Vanderburg 06:01
I love that, because I will. I mean to me, the concept of the Dayton encore fellows was exactly what we need more of, right? We need it. We’ve got all of this incredible talent, and we can’t just push it aside and say, Oh, you don’t matter anymore. We’re not listening to you instead. And to me, the Dayton encore, the Del Mar encore fellows was such a great and it is such a great example of how, instead, we take a different view, and we say, you know, what are these gifts that people have, and how do we use them to benefit our community? So yeah. And there we go, yeah.

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins 06:35
And Eric. Eric was, is professionally, was a filmmaker, worked in educational video. And so he came and partnered with us for the first year to develop two videos to go along with the curriculum that we were developing called another day older, which is a conversation guide for small groups, for conversations to help and as an entry point for people who haven’t thought about this, who haven’t, don’t have any awareness yet about ageism. And so he put together the videos because we wanted that curriculum to be something that anybody can pick up. You don’t have to be an expert on the topic. You just need to be able to help lead the conversations. So yeah, you were very much at the beginning. And Eric just dove right in, right into the whole subject. And yeah, we continue to we’ve now done a second edition of that curriculum, and it continues to be alive and well. So

Janine Vanderburg 07:28
I’ve got to check this out. I’ve got to check this out because I do think that video is such a powerful way to communicate this message. So

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins 07:37
yeah, so we use some other videos that other people have produced that are available out there for free. And then Eric produced two of them, from speaking to beginning in the space of and thinking about older individuals in the workplace to starting changing the narrative. Where is it at this point, now 20, almost 20 years after your official foray into those listening sessions. Where is it in this social movement that really grabs your heart and that you that you lead with?

Janine Vanderburg 08:09
Yeah, so for me, it really is about work. And the reason it’s about work is, well, one, one of the things that’s always driven me and concerned me is the economic security of older women. And one of the things that we know about ageism is it disproportionately affects women, and especially women of color, and we also know that among women of my generation, we’re more likely to have been paid less over a lifetime. We are much more likely to have stepped out of the workplace to care for children, and now very likely to be stepping out of the workplace or calling back to caregivers for older family members. So what happens with that? What happens with that is we end up with less money, whether it’s social security, savings, pension or anything like that. And one of the things that really struck me in that first Junior when I started changing the narrative was I was doing a workshop, and there was a group of older women. They were women my age in the workshop, and we had refreshments after, and as we were kind of wrapping up with the refreshment portion, I noticed them taking the refreshments and literally putting them in tote bags. And part of me was like, Oh, great, I don’t have to clean up. And then part of me was like, What’s going on here? So I sat down and chatted with them and realized how women my age were trying to live on very small amounts of Social Security. They wanted to work. You know, these women who had been teachers and nurses and business owners and everything else, and they wanted to work and they needed to work, and even though there were help wanted signs all over the main street in the town, they weren’t being hired. So it really led me to dive deeper into workplace age discrimination and what causes it. And we’ve got this. I call it a puzzling paradox. Is when I’m being nice, and sometimes I just call it just plain stupid. We have all of these unfilled jobs in almost every community in every industry, and we have older people with great experience who want to work and why can’t we make that connection? So I think that particular area is an area that I am really focusing my efforts on now. So I spend most of my time talking to people like on this podcast, but also talking to businesses, to brands, to employers of any kind, public, private, non profit, on the business case for older workers in intergenerational teams, which is really strong, and also how they’re missing out, right out, when they just overlook if you’re saying I’m not going to be able to fill shifts and I’m not going to be able to do this growth that I want in my business, because I don’t have employees. We’ve got all of these potential employees who could be a tremendous asset. There’s something wrong with that. So I’m real. I try to speak a lot about that, that’s what I’m most passionate about. I also understand the other side of it, because as we get older, we’re surrounded by so many messages that we start internalizing them. So if the world is telling us we don’t have value, we may start believing that if the world is telling us, oh, we can’t learn new things, we may start believing that if the world is telling us, and this one of the common stereotypes right about all of us, we get older, we’re digitally incompetent, despite the fact that, you know, we all figured out how to use Zoom and our cell phones and everything else during the pandemic, And that all the research that’s been done shows that actually, our adoption is at a pretty high level. And by the way, we’re also kind of the generation that, you know, kind of went from those phones that were on our walls in the house with the party line to, you know, down to smartphones. And you know, kind of went from typewriter to computer to laptop. Are now mastering AI generative, AI So, but there’s still that mythology that persists. So one of the things that I try to do as well is to talk to my peers and all of us who are older don’t believe the stuff that people are saying about you, right? There’s another way to look at it, and that we’ve got to believe in ourselves.

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins 12:26
Should have looked it up. And I tried to find it quickly, but I couldn’t. I saw headline yesterday, and I think it was yesterday, talking about how, basically the gist was, the fact that folks in our generation are working longer, means that younger individuals are not able to move up the corporate ladder as quickly, and so we are jeopardizing their own financial security now and in the future. How do you respond? Well, I

Janine Vanderburg 12:56
could, I recognize this is a podcast, so I’m not going to do my usual scream, screaming is what I would be inclined to do. Beth Keras, it is, and I want everybody to just think about this. Does this make sense? We have and this is in the United States. Every month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issues a report, and the report says that there are far more unfilled jobs than there are people applying right? So on its surface, that’s ridiculous. The other example that I’d like to use is that these aren’t equivalent positions. The positions that we may be in aren’t necessarily the one that somebody coming out of college or high school would go into I actually a good friend of mine, when I started changing the narrative, said to me, she herself and our generation said, okay, so I really appreciate this thing that you’re doing around aging and ageism to me, but it was a version of, shouldn’t we get out of The way? Now this woman is an incredible activist for food justice. Have been so throughout my lifetime, and I basically told her, okay, so if you step out of the way, who the athlete is going to show younger people coming into the advocacy field in the hunger space, how to talk to the state legislature, how to move policy, whatever. It’s not like that. We’ve got to figure out instead, and that’s why I’m such a believer and a champion of the idea of intergenerational mentoring, intergenerational relationships. I feel like we have an obligation to kind of learn from each other, but also kind of show what we know. And if we all disappear from the workforce, that’s not going to happen. So it’s not just about institutional knowledge. It’s about how things get done. And there are a number of things. So that would be the reason, I mean, one. So reason number one is unfilled jobs. Reason number two is that I think it’s incumbent that we have this kind of transfer of knowledge and understanding. And Reason number three is, if you were doing something and you were doing it, well, why would you get out of the way? It’s standard, us versus them. It’s a very common narrative in our country, right? It’s native born versus immigrants. It’s men versus women. It’s, you know, it’s all the things, and it’s not useful, it’s not productive. It doesn’t get us anywhere. We should instead be figuring out where the big challenges are. How do we do them together? Right? So I’m not going to scream. Hopefully, that was a more eloquent explanation than we were.

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins 15:32
But you make you scream if you wanted to, that there is no judgment here. And remember, we also edited so it was an ugly screen. We could we can screen, it would

Janine Vanderburg 15:43
be an ugly scream. I feel very ugly. No, I say this all the time. I actually wrote an article on LinkedIn because both the Washington Post and Axios, I think, within probably the last month or month and a half, had similar headlines. And I was like, Oh, come on. Here we go again, right? So, yeah, yeah, just say, No, I’m

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins 16:04
not. We probably want to use that phrase. I’m not sure it worked really well the first time

Janine Vanderburg 16:10
I did it. What good points? Good point. Yeah. Context is everything, yeah.

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins 16:15
So you do a lot of conversation and talking with the systems, with corporations, and you’re working in the uncoord space, what is the message that you, that you carry, that you really want everyone who’s aging, particularly those who are already in later life, to know about what we as individuals might need to do? Yeah,

Janine Vanderburg 16:39
so I have a couple of things. And one, I just like to say, you know, we are all caging. So the one thing we all have in common at this point of time is today, for each one of us, it’s the oldest we’ve ever been. And I always like for people to think about this before they go to sleep tonight. Wow, this the youngest I’ll ever be again, right? If I’m fortunate, I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning a day older. So with that context. But I think that there are things that we need to do because again, and it’s really important, because we’re surrounded by an age is culture, and we know that the research of Dr Becca Levy of the Yale School of Public Health has shown really powerfully that if we are able to cultivate positive beliefs about ourselves aging right, we’re gonna have better. We’re going to live longer. We’re going to live better. We have a reduced likelihood of developing dementia. We have an increased likelihood of recovery from injury and illness. So those are all reasons why we should cultivate positive beliefs. And the way I like to think about it, I call it my ABC method, right? So it’s easy to remember that first we have to look at assumptions, right? What are the assumptions we are making about ourselves aging? If we make an assumption, if we find ourselves saying, oh, you know, I’d really like to try that, but I think I’m too old to learn something new, we need to challenge those assumptions in ourselves. And one of the things that I found really useful. And I’ve done this with my friends. It’s awful to be a friend of mine in this space, because I’m always telling people, okay, you need to do this. You can’t age, but we can challenge our assumptions by thinking of what’s something that you learned in the last year, no matter how painfully learned right now. Multiply that over a lifetime. What have we learned the last two years, five years, 10 years, right? What did we all learn during the pandemic? We all learn new things, and if it wasn’t how to bake sourdough bread, maybe we learned that we could entertain ourselves and, you know, we could zoom with our children and grandchildren, or our long lost girlfriends or that kind of thing. So challenge assumptions that we might be making about ourselves in aging. So that’s our A assumptions. Ask ourselves about what assumptions we’re making, but B has bright spots. And one of the things, and this came out of my career, and literally, I called it consulting and social change, but one of the things that I learned was, how do we it’s so easy, right, to always look at the things that are going bad. So I can look at my knee and just go, My knee hurts, you know, all of those things. Or, you know, I hid too long yesterday, so now my feet are hurting, all of that. So it’s attributed to aging. But one of the things that we know is really successful in social change. And Chip and Dan Heath wrote about in one of their books about change, is when we look at the bright spots, what are, what’s going well, what’s going well, and then we focus more, okay, what can we learn from what’s going well? Maybe what’s going well is, and I will say for me, I moved to a new community in the middle of the pandemic. So I had to and everything was closed. So I had to figure out new ways to make new friends, because I could join a group, or that kind of thing, you know, like everything was open. Groups were, you know, everything was closed. So you had to kind of figure out other ways to do it. So look at the bright spots of When have you, whether it’s learned something new, made a new connection, or simply, what’s going right in your life? You know what’s going right in my life is, for me, is I get to talk to amazing people all the time, like, like you all the group from United Church homes that was at your symposium, and see, wow, there are a lot of people talking about this now, and a lot of people. That’s a bright spot for me. So I could go, Whoa, we still have ageism. It’s awful. Or I could say, wow, look at this amazing symposium that United Church homes put on. And here are all of these people who gathered to talk about this topic. So I think that, but that’s something we can all do in our own lives. Look for the bright spots, and the C I think, is the power of connection. So many people are talking about connection and social isolation and all of that, and we can wallow in it a little bit, right? But I think it’s important to connect. And I know, I mean, one of the things that you all do is offer a lot of opportunities for people to connect, right? So we all need to think about how we can connect with others. But I also think it’s really important for us at this life stage to really connect with our own kind of meaning and purpose. What is it that we really want? And I read a book last year called 4000 weeks. And basically, if you live to 80, you’ve got 4000 weeks. So I did my back napkin calculation, and at the time I read it, I was 70. So I was like, okay, that gives me about like, 50 weeks or something. And so knowing that really kind of sharpens things up. And so I was really, I’ve always been clear on my meaning and purpose, and it’s about changing things that can’t be changed, and using whatever talents I have to be able to do that. But it was also one of the things that I did really so that I could spend more time working on that, I created something that I call the anti bucket list. I highly encourage everybody to do this, and it’s kind of a list of, here are the things I never want to do again. Here are the experiences I don’t want to have. You still leave yourself open to new experiences, but you literally make a list of, I’ve done this before. I know I don’t want to do it again, so I’m not going to spend time on it. And those are the things I’m going to say no to. And that, for me, was really powerful, because I think it was an oldest child thing. I’ve always had this sense of obligation. I had to do anything, and now I’m just like, No, I don’t want to do that. And I can blame it on my anti bucket list that I created

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins 22:37
That’s a great list and I love that idea. And actually, I quote you. I know that Joe Coughlin talks about the life of a spy for 8000 days there. There are four segments, right? And he thinks in days. And I have written 500 weeks from age 70 and I use that when I’m doing workshops and in conversations with folks. We have a finite period of time, the problem is we don’t know how much that is. We don’t know when it is right. It could so then how do we just use the information that this is finite to help us prioritize and do what we can do? For 30 years, our family directs a family camp every summer, and it started out small, but for 30 years, I took a beaterie, I packed this bulk of stuff, and from 10 to 50 people every afternoon would come to this room and this building, and we would do jewelry making, and it was great fun and a lot of energy for about the first 27 years, and then I continued to do it because it was an expectation. And then the pandemic hit, and we did, we couldn’t camp at all. And then the second year, we did camp, but it was a shorter version, and so I stopped doing the beauty, and then camp resumed, and I didn’t take the beauty, and nobody complained too loudly, and I have to tell you that it is on my anti bucket list. And this summer, I gave away the remaining beads to a neighbor and to another dear friend. I kept on I kept some of them to myself, and what a relief it is to know that I don’t have to do this thing that I thought other people expected it of me and to give away and let go of that

Janine Vanderburg 24:28
I am so much that is such a great example of what it is deliberately thinking this is, you know, I don’t, I’ve done that. Yeah, I don’t need to and it can be I don’t need to do it anymore, or I don’t want to do it anymore, yeah? And literally, I’m a happy camper again. That’s funny. Yeah? No, a happy camper without beads. But you could save the beads and give them to me so we could make more of our Taylor Swift. End To ages and bracelets.

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins 24:59
Well, you. Yeah, I don’t have what I did. Never did much in the alphabet beads, but I still do have beads. The next time you’re in Ohio, you can have a little minute, we’ll do that. Okay, okay, so you talked about assumption, yeah,

Janine Vanderburg 25:13
bright spots, looking for the bright spots, looking for the bright spots. And then C is really, how do we connect? How do we connect with ourselves, even using tools like an anti Bucket List of connecting with what we really want and what we don’t want? And then I think the, you know, kind of connection with others, one of the things that makes me sad is when people feel I’m just isolated, I’m lonely, and that kind of thing. And I will, and I will say that when we moved to this rural community in the middle of the pandemic, I was totally feeling that way. And I was like, if I went out in my yard like I would do in the city, and waved to people, all I would wave towards deer and elk. So that wasn’t working for me. So I had to figure it out. And I kind of just, I started, like, literally looking online. I mean, literally, I was, like, making Facebook reds. And then when things started to open up, it was like, Okay, do you want to go have coffee? Or I literally would ask my damn friends, do you know any of these people here or that kind of thing? And I feel like all of you know, it requires a bit of an effort. I think that’s also why it’s so important to have programs like the ones you do. But I also feel like connecting needs to be around the things that you love and you care about, because then you get a more authentic connection, right? I didn’t want to just talk to people, just to talk to people. For me, it’s important to connect with people who share my values, who care about social change, who want to do things and so eventually got there. So now I’ve got several groups in my kind of rural community that I connect with, but I think it’s that, to me, the c part is so important. And to me, the connection works best when we’re able to find common ground. I actually have done some activities like getting a group of people together. I almost think of it as a speed dating kind of thing, except it’s not dating, but it’s like just pairing people up. Okay, you got three minutes to figure out one thing you have in common. Okay, great. Now you’re gonna go on, go on, until you kind of find some clicks and connections. And those are the kinds of activities that I think especially organizations that are looking to serve older adults, as opposed to just bringing everybody in the room and hoping that people connect again. That’s what I think you did beautifully during the symposium. There were just opportunities for people to talk and connect, and there were great activities. So,

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins 27:40
yeah, I think we think about trend making when we’re children, right? And friend making I found easy when I had kids, because then we were having to interact with other parents, right? But making friends is different later in life, and it’s harder.

Janine Vanderburg 27:59
I mean exactly, if you’re in college, you’re, you know, you’re kind of living with others. I mean, I’m very blessed because I still have a text chain going with my cool college friends. We all met over 50 years ago, right? And we just, you know, it wasn’t always true, but we reconnected again over a decade ago. When we’re having kids, it’s really easy, and now it just takes more of an effort. But I also think it’s so worthwhile, and I think it’s one of those things that’s really more to do, and we kind of, what I learned is you can’t wait for people to come to us, right? Because then you’re just going to sit there and wait and you know, you’re going to go in a downward spiral. Nobody likes me, nobody invites me anywhere or whatever. And so, you know, we have to be willing to just go out and try things and realize that you may feel like a wallflower again, and maybe you haven’t felt like that since you were in middle school. But I think it’s, you know, well worthwhile. And I also think, though, but that’s an area where communities should be providing support. And again, I think you know what you’re doing at United Church homes is so important. And if we could replicate that everywhere, so that there are opportunities for people to genuinely connect, that would be fabulous. Well,

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins 29:12
There’s always a lot of work, more work yet to be done. As we quote the woman in whose honor the center’s named Ruth Frost Parker, that’s one of the things she always said, there’s still much work to be done. So, yeah, yeah.

Janine Vanderburg 29:25
None of us have women, yeah.

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins 29:26
None of us are gonna go bored. So much to do, right? Yeah, yeah. So one thing that we like to do, I think I warned you about at the end of our podcasts, is to ask your guests questions about their own perspectives on age before we do that. Is there a way that people, if they want to be in contact with you, that you would recommend they do so

Janine Vanderburg 29:48
sure, if anybody is on LinkedIn, I’m on LinkedIn, and it literally is Janine van der Burg, or people can just email me. Janine at Encore roadmap.com, dot. Yeah, great. So I always respond to email and I never respond to text, and literally, my daughters will text my husband and say, Would you tell mom to look at her text? So

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins 30:13
yeah, I think that’s one of the, one of the, the joys of life here in the 21st century. And the challenge is, we all have our preferred methods of communication, trying to remember. We used to have to remember telephone numbers. We don’t have to remember telephone numbers. We have to remember the mode of communication that’s going to work best.

Janine Vanderburg 30:29
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Okay. So

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins 30:32
Here’s the first question. When you think about how you’ve aged, what do you think has changed about you or grown with you that you really like about yourself?

Janine Vanderburg 30:43
So I think the biggest thing that I like about myself is something that I kind of steered away from most of my life. People always called me impatient. I wanted things to happen, and I wanted things to happen now and when I took the strengths, Gallup strengths, finders test decades ago, it showed that my top two strengths were futuristic, and then the next was activator. And my team and my consulting firm used to say, yeah, she always sees the future and she wants it to have happened yesterday, and wonders why we haven’t done it yet. So I always thought that was probably a bad thing. And now I’m realizing, especially, you know, as I look at my own short and timeline, that’s probably my superpower. I mean, there are a number of things when people have said, Oh, let’s just increase awareness of age, and I’m like, No, I want it to end. When in Colorado, you realize that employers were screening out older workers based on their age and algorithms and graduation dates. We proposed legislation to ban employers from asking for age or graduation dates on initial job applications. And everybody was like, Oh, this is going to take years to pass and years to pass. And I was like, we don’t have years of people right now. We got it done in one year. So I feel like that quality is that shadow quality of being impatient, actually, it’s super power. So I’m appreciating it as I get older. That’s

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins 32:10
fantastic. Okay, question number two is a little bit different. But what has surprised you most about you as you’ve aged? Did I

Janine Vanderburg 32:19
have a type bucket list that I say outside. But what surprised me, probably is that my knee injury that I encouraged when I was 14, and that never bothered me, popped back up when I was 66 but now that I might have been an oldest child, I always felt this sense of obligation. If somebody asked me to do something, I had to do it. Right? It was my responsibility to do it. If I wanted social change to occur, I had to do everything. And so having this anti bucket list and just saying that sounds really interesting, no, as I think, really surprised me, and it’s really surprised everybody around me who’s asking me to do stuff, because they always thought I would say yes, so

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins 33:00
excellent, and unless I think we all need to learn, but I know I need to learn. And finally, last question, is there someone that you’ve met who’s been in your life, who has set a good example for you in aging, someone that inspires you, as we say at the Parker center, who has influenced you to age abundantly?

Janine Vanderburg 33:18
Yeah, so this woman was nearing her 60s, and had always wanted to go to college. Grew up in an immigrant family that sent the boys to college and not the girls. She was really smart. Graduated from high school at age 16, but then basically worked in the factory until she got married, had kids, and as she is nearing her 60s, she looks at her husband and says, I want to go to college. After being stunned, he said, Okay, he enrolled. Oh, she enrolled, and graduated four years later, magna cum laude from the local university and fluent, not only in her native French and English, but also in Spanish and in Portuguese. And that was important to her, because those were languages spoken in the community in which she lived, and that woman was my mom, and I never, ever saw my mom as happy as the day that she was walking across the stage getting her diploma. And it really led me to this sort of notion that I have, that I say everywhere I can. You know, it’s not too late. Dreams don’t have an expiration date. If there is something that we want to do, like now is the time to do it. It was such a powerful example to me that we didn’t have to have societal expectations. This is a woman who lived by societal expectations all her life, until she was nearing 60, and then just said, I’ve always wanted to do this. And so my Her name was John deck Joan of Arc, French, Canadian, and I have a. Picture her next to this bronze statue of Joan of Arc. This kind of continues to remind me why the work that you and I and so many others now do is important, and why we need to keep spreading this message. Thank

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins 35:16
you for sharing, Yeah, amazing story. Well, thank you. And thank you to our listeners for listening to this episode of The Art of aging, part of the abundant aging podcast series from United Church homes. We want to hear from you what’s changed about you as you’ve aged, that you love, what surprised you. And how do you define abundant aging? And who is your abundant aging influencer? Join us at visit us at abundantagingpodcast.com, to share your ideas. You can also give us feedback when you visit the Ruth Frost Parker Center website at unitedchurchhomes.org/Parker-center and Janine one more time, people can find you on LinkedIn at Janine Vanderburg.

Janine Vanderburg 36:01
LinkedIn, Janine Vanderburg, is the place where I am most active, and I am constantly there, unlike on my phone or anywhere else. So but also email me.

Rev. Beth Long-Higgins 36:15
Well, thank you very much for this conversation, and until our paths cross again.