Nursing Home Residents Stayed Connected During the Pandemic Thanks to Letters for Rose
In this op-ed, the co-founders of Letters for Rose talk about what they learned from writing letters to seniors during the pandemic.
By Layla Hurwitz and Annika Aristimuno
Shelley lives in a nursing home in Brighton, Massachussetts, and has been feeling isolated ever since the pandemic started. "You miss the closeness with people — whether it's family or friends; you miss the contact," she says. Last September, Shelley started receiving letters written by high school students volunteering for the Brookline chapter of Letters for Rose (LFR). "When you're in a nursing home and you receive letters like that, it lifts your spirits," Shelley says.
Lily Lockwood, the 16-year-old head of LFR's Brookline chapter, says that leading the letter-writing effort has helped reduce her own feelings of isolation during the pandemic, and has helped her grow. "It's just fun to be able to lead," she says. "It's taught me a lot about communicating with people and making sure that everyone is on the same page." She also feels a sense of purpose as part of a national organization. "You have this community of over 1,000 people just to talk to and lean on," she says. "Everyone's individual effort has become more powerful together."
When we started Letters for Rose in March 2020, we had no idea that it would grow to encompass 166 chapters in the U.S. and overseas. Schools in our town of Montclair, New Jersey, had just shut down, and we were excited about what we thought would be a two-week break in the middle of a stressful sophomore year. But we were also worried about missing our weekly volunteering trips to the local nursing home. Our thoughts raced: Would the residents be okay? Who would talk with them during tea time? After we calmed down, we decided to call the nursing home and ask them what their plan was for allowing volunteers to return. After many calls, the facility finally responded: They were closing their doors to volunteers until further notice.
As we took in this devastating news, we remembered how our volunteering had started. Initially, we volunteered at the nursing home simply to fulfill our Key Club's service-hour requirement and had no idea of the impact it would end up having — on us as well as the residents. Every Monday, when we arrived at the home, we would put our phones down to sit with the elders during their tea time. We served cookies, listened to music, and played bingo. We would ask them questions about their lives, current events, music, sports, and sometimes share about our own lives. The residents' eyes lit up with pure delight to see our faces. We suspected that the aides who spent their days running from resident to resident often lacked the time to sit down to connect and talk with the residents. We'd sometimes see rows of elders in wheelchairs lined up in front of the TV, and wonder how long they'd been sitting there. Some would fall asleep or beg us to get them out of the facility. The elders truly needed all the attention they could get.
One of the residents, Rose, had a vibrant, spunky personality. She would share stories and give us hugs whenever we arrived to volunteer. We would draw with her, serve her meals, and simply listen to her stories. As the pandemic got underway, we remembered seeing another resident receive mail from her family and sob because one of her children had thought to send her a letter. Recalling this incident made us realize that letter writing was a way we could stay connected with Rose and the other residents. It would also give us a project to focus on while our school figured out how to set up distance learning.
Implementing our plan was more difficult than we expected. The nursing home was hit hard, and sadly lost its director and too many residents to the virus. It was not until July that we finally received a list of names from the nursing home, and we assigned each resident to a group of friends who were willing to write a letter. By this point, we realized that the pandemic was not going away anytime soon and that communities everywhere would benefit from our idea. We had plenty of free time due to the lockdown, so we decided to share the idea with people we knew: friends from other organizations and sleepaway camp, as well as relatives who lived in other states.
As the idea spread, we decided to name the effort "Letters for Rose" in honor of our friend Rose, and to organize through local "chapters." Each chapter would focus on their community, find local letter writers, and send letters to local nursing homes. High schoolers who were battling isolation just like the residents soon showed interest in helping our cause. We took advantage of online apps such as Zoom, Slack, and Google Forms to communicate and problem-solve with our leadership team. We realized we could use social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok to expand even more. Within a couple of weeks, we were having daily Zoom meetings with people from Arizona, Massachusetts, California, and New York City. And LFR has continued to grow steadily for nine months now. Our project is now truly national and beginning to have a meaningful international presence. We have also expanded to include students from elementary school through high school. We track data and effectiveness, and are learning how to be leadership coaches, organizational managers, and public speakers.
As the pandemic wanes, we are asking ourselves what LFR can teach us about the changing nature of community service and leadership. The concept of "service hours" — a kind of currency that was originally supposed to quantify the amount of a student's volunteering — has become just another task to fulfill graduation requirements or increase your chances of college admission. "Service hours" often seem disconnected from meaningful community experiences and could take the fun out of volunteering.
Creating a national social enterprise from scratch, with no faculty adviser and no budget, has taught us and our team members the joy of tapping our collective talent to help others. We have also learned that great ideas can emerge from seemingly hopeless situations. As the pandemic got worse, we were tempted to surrender hope, thinking there was nothing we could do to help or stop it. Instead, LFR gave us confidence that even in the absence (or maybe because of the absence) of traditional settings such as classrooms and established clubs, we can organize solutions to anything we set our minds to. We also learned that teenagers are really good at using social media to drive engagement — a talent that traditional service programs we worked with rarely harnessed.
Even after the pandemic ends, there will be crises, injustices, and other complicated problems that need solving. A simple idea like sending an "old-school" letter can be scaled, using "new-school" communication platforms, into a national endeavor. Our hope is that Letters for Rose will inspire other students to trust their vision and their capacities, and to use the power of connectedness to have a lasting impact on the world. And we plan to keep on writing letters.
Ways to get involved with Letters for Rose:
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/letters.forrose
Website: www.lettersforrose.org
Instagram: www.instagram.com/letters.forrose (DM us on Instagram if you want to write letters, so we can connect you with a nearby chapter!)
Start your own chapter (only for committed leaders- not just letter writers): https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf7bI1DBK26Q5iJlI6-20xkfVh6Uh10P_FOru0-NPmns68e8Q/viewform
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