Strategic education, training and consulting for organisations ready to embed intergenerational connection as a genuine practice — not just a program.

Whether you’re building capability within your team, seeking a keynote that shifts thinking, or looking for strategic direction on your intergenerational approach — Heart & Soul Story brings over seven years of frontline practice and systems-level experience to our approach.

Working at a grassroots level across public, private and independent high schools as well as three of Australia’s leading aged care providers, Bupa, Opal Healthcare and HammondCare has allowed Heart & Soul Story to gain a birdseye view of both the practical challenges and increasing physical, social and economic benefits of adopting intergenerational connection as a strategic imperative.

We provide expertise, education and training to build awareness and capability for aged care homes & community aged home care providers and schools and councils to run their own intergenerational programs and initiatives or form partnerships to build on existing connections in the community.

We also work with corporate organisations to bring the benefits of intergenerational practice into the workplace — creating environments where different generations learn from one another, feel valued, and contribute in meaningful ways. This approach not only strengthens connection and culture, but supports wellbeing, purpose and a deeper sense of belonging at work

Sometimes it’s the smallest rituals that create the biggest ripple. A simple weekly session newsletter update can turn a one-hour visit into something that lives on — across families, staff, and the wider community. Click the image above to find out more.

Excerpt from School News Special Report, Term 4 2022

Heart & Soul Story founder Samantha Heron has facilitated intergenerational programs with older students and said the benefits for teens were just as apparent.

Ms Heron said that while intergenerational engagement was not the “magic solution” to youth mental health, it could form a valuable part of the response. “I see it as part of a holistic solution. We’re certainly not going to say, ‘hey, we can solve mental health’. But I think it’s a crisis of our time that young people don’t have access to the elders of our society who used to play such a pivotal role in helping guide our youth. “I look at our Indigenous people and how they work as a community, and I think we should look at how our society could bring our communities back to being closer to that.”

“I work with Years 9 and 10, and within the teenage groups, they’re on a journey into adulthood themselves,” she said. “So that can be quite a self-reflective time in life, but it can also be quite a narcissistic and egocentric time.” However, Ms Heron said that self-reported outcomes from the teenagers saw an increase in gratitude, in patience and an increase in confidence. She said that after her initial pilot study in 2017, she followed up with one of the students who had been involved to see the long term impacts of the program. “She had been in Year 7, and I caught up with her in Year 9,” she said. “She really reflected on the fact that at the time, she was so caught up in how bad everything in her own life was. And I think having heard stories from an older person who’d had a pretty difficult life, you know, been through the war, had lost a few brothers in the war. And yet she was an incredibly resilient and happy older person.

“So, I think for the student, it really made her reflect on the fact that sometimes they were getting caught up in stuff in their lives that might not actually be that important. “And she was quite a shy, nervous child and she also said it gave her so much more confidence to be able to go back to school and actually speak to other kids.” In addition to the friendships formed with the older people, Ms Heron also observed a strengthening in friendships for the students.

“I think for teenagers [the feeling of loneliness] has been exacerbated by social media, it’s all about the number of followers and the number of likes,” she said. “But they get to make authentic friendships with the older people, and also within their group. It’s like anything, when you go through an experience together as a cohort there’s a sense of camaraderie.”

School News Special Report, Term 4 2022