Working with Retirement Communities

Sarah Lawrence partners with retirement communities to create meaningful opportunities for residents to continue learning, asking questions, exchanging ideas, and discovering new interests.

These are not off-the-shelf programs. Every community has its own character, priorities, and residents. We begin by listening - often through focus groups with residents - to understand what they are curious about, how they want to learn, and what kinds of experiences would be most valuable to them. We then work with the community to develop a bespoke educational offering shaped around those interests.

We are most interested in genuine, sustained partnerships.

That may include an ongoing series of faculty-led courses, seminars, lectures, workshops, facilitated conversations, creative experiences, or other forms of intellectual engagement. The precise model can vary, but the goal is the same: to create an educational relationship that becomes a distinctive and valued part of the community.

Rather than simply bringing individual activities into a retirement community, we work collaboratively to build something with coherence, purpose, and room to evolve. Over time, the partnership can respond to residents’ changing interests, introduce new subjects and perspectives, and create a recognizable culture of inquiry within the community.

Resident-informed

Our process begins with the people who will participate.

Through resident focus groups and conversations with community leadership, we explore questions such as:

• What are residents most interested in learning about?
• Do they prefer lectures, discussion-based seminars, short courses, workshops, or a combination?
• Which subjects, questions, and creative practices would they like to investigate?
• How important are interaction, discussion, and opportunities to contribute their own knowledge?
• What schedule, format, and pace would make participation most appealing?

The answers help us develop a tailored offering that reflects residents’ interests rather than assumptions about what older adults want.

Jointly developed

We work with staff to develop an education plan together specifically for their residents

Faculty-led

Courses and seminars are led by Sarah Lawrence faculty across the liberal arts, including humanities, arts, sciences, and current affairs.

Programming might draw from literature, history, philosophy, psychology, politics, the arts, writing, science, culture, or interdisciplinary questions that do not fit neatly within a single subject. Offerings can also be organized around larger themes, such as purpose, creativity, identity, change, place, memory, or what it means to live a longer life.

Format-flexible

Seminar, small-group discussion, and interactive lecture formats, delivered on-site, informed by what residents tell us they want

Open-access

No academic prerequisites required

A Sarah Lawrence partnership gives residents opportunities to:

• Continue exploring serious ideas without the pressure of grades, tests, or prerequisites
• Learn with accomplished faculty members, artists, writers, scholars, and practitioners
• Discover unfamiliar subjects and return to longstanding interests
• Participate in thoughtful conversation rather than simply receive information
• Build relationships with neighbors through shared intellectual experiences
• Exercise curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, and imagination
• Contribute their own experience, knowledge, and perspectives
• Maintain a meaningful connection to the life and resources of a college

For many residents, learning is not merely a pastime. It is a way to remain engaged with the world, connect with other people, reconsider familiar questions, and continue becoming more fully themselves.

Today’s residents - and the generations now approaching retirement - often have high expectations for the intellectual and cultural life of the communities they choose.

A partnership with Sarah Lawrence can help a retirement community in multiple ways.

1. A stronger resident experience: Engage residents intellectually with substantive, university-level learning designed around their interests.
2. A powerful marketing advantage: A formal college partnership helps differentiate your community in the market and provides a compelling benefit to highlight in tours, brochures, and conversations with prospective residents and families.
3. More varied and sophisticated programming: Sarah Lawrence can draw on many academic disciplines, allowing your community to offer a continually changing program rather than relying on a narrow range of familiar topics.
4. Stronger resident retention and satisfaction: High-quality educational opportunities can increase residents’ sense that your community continues to invest in their growth, interests, and quality of life.
5. Enhanced credibility and prestige: Affiliation with Sarah Lawrence College gives the educational program institutional credibility and reinforces your community’s identity as a place for active, intellectually engaged adults.
6. Greater social connection: Build community through facilitated learning, discussion, and exploration, helping residents form friendships and develop an ongoing sense of community.
7. A flexible, low-burden programming model: Ease the administrative burden of finding quality educational programing for your residents.
8. Opportunities for intergenerational engagement: Our Premiere Partnership model provides opportunities for residents to interact with Sarah Lawrence students through performances and collaborative learning.
9. Access to respected faculty and experts: Your community gains a reliable source of knowledgeable, engaging instructors without having to identify, vet, and manage individual speakers independently.

A robust learning partnership can become more than a resident benefit. It can help communicate what a community believes later life can be.

Sarah Lawrence has always approached education differently.

Our academic model is built around close engagement between faculty and students, interdisciplinary exploration, active participation, and the freedom to follow consequential questions wherever they lead. We do not believe that education is limited to a particular age or stage of life.

As a nationally recognized liberal arts college, Sarah Lawrence can draw upon a rich community of faculty members, writers, artists, scholars, and practitioners. Our strengths across the humanities, creative arts, social sciences, and other disciplines make it possible to create offerings that are both intellectually substantial and highly engaging.

Just as importantly, we understand how to create learning experiences for adults who bring extensive knowledge and life experience into the room. Residents are not treated as passive audiences. They are invited to question, interpret, discuss, create, and contribute.

Every partnership begins with a conversation.

We work with community leaders to understand their residents, goals, existing offerings, and vision for the future. From there, we can conduct resident focus groups, identify promising themes and formats, and develop a proposal suited to the community.

The result might be a carefully curated lecture series, a sequence of interactive seminars, a signature course, a yearlong program, or a broader educational partnership. What matters is that the offering is created thoughtfully, reflects the interests of residents, and advances the community’s larger goals.

Interested in exploring a partnership with Sarah Lawrence College?

Contact the Office of Lifelong Learning to begin a conversation about what we might create together.

Office of Lifelong Learning
Sarah Lawrence College
1 Mead Way
Bronxville, NY 10708
lifelonglearning@sarahlawrence.edu
914-395-2659 / 914-395-2524