Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 7, Issue 2, February 2003

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SPICE program seeks to bridge age gap between generations

By MATTHEW PREUSCH

At pizza night at Ballard's SPICE intergenerational program, below Whittier Elementary School, the young and old alike impatiently eyed the oven, waiting for their hand-built pies to emerge, signaling dinner time.

Pizza, it seemed, was something every generation could agree on.

Seated at one table were Audrey Willmarth, 83, Jill Isaacson, 21, and Surraya, an 11-year-old fifth grader at Whittier Elementary wary of giving a stranger her last name. The three, sharing in a bingo game, formed a demographically diverse dinner trio.

Willmarth, from Ballard, has been coming to SPICE since its introduction over 20 years ago. "I think the children are wonderful. I think they're so responsive. At my age, I can't believe there are programs like this," she said.

But intergenerational programming may be a thing of the past in Seattle. SPICE, which stands for Success in Providing Intergenerational Community Enrichment, is one of the City's last programs that brings together elders with youngsters.

This year, the program's budget was reduced by more than two thirds, plummeting from about $307,000 in 2002 to just $70,000 for 2003. (The City's Human Services Department's overall budget rose about $2.5 million in 2003, to $87, 437,000.)

Selina Chow, operations manager at the Division of Aging and Disability, which contracts with SPICE, said City leaders, facing a drastically reduced pool of money, looked to redirect funding in the last budget to core services for seniors, such as nutrition or support for the frail, and away from anything non-essential.

"When the budget gets tighter, we have to go even closer to look at those areas, those criteria," she said.

But Chow said the decision to cut back on SPICE was not made in a bureaucratic vacuum; it came from the seniors themselves, whose interest in intergenerational programs has been fading as of late. When the division canvassed seniors and retirees last year, they got a clear answer: We want a return traditional programming ditch the interaction with toddlers or teenagers, the survey respondents said.

To that end, the City handed one of SPICE's former program centers, at McClure Middle School in Queen Anne, to the parks department, which promised to offer a senior-friendly regiment of activities. Katherine Evans, who oversees SPICE's contract with the City, said that decision was overdue.

"They had complained for quite some time about the focus of the program being on working with the schoolchildren at McClure school," said Evans. She said seniors were "quite interested in the parks program and quite disinterested in the continuation of the SPICE program."

Losing McClure was just one is a series of recent setbacks for SPICE. Aside from losing two thirds of its budget, SPICE recently closed programs in Lake City and West Seattle. Another, in Wedgwood, was shut down before it even got started.

The program also has a rocky history. In the 1990s, SPICE, then run by the Seattle School District, was the center of a minor scandal after some accounting employees were caught embezzling large sums of money. That turned away a number of seniors.

"It's left a really bad taste in the mouth of many in the SPICE folks, because that was money that was for many of their activities," said Evans.

None of that has dimmed the enthusiasm of Sonya Couch, director of SPICE's remaining program at Whittier. Couch, 24, is a long-time volunteer for the Fremont Public Association, and is now the only paid SPICE staff. Over her three years with SPICE, she's seen it transform from a purely intergenerational undertaking to a standard "senior center program."

But she still enjoys bringing in students from Whittier's World of Wonder program to take part in events like pizza night. Between calling out bingo squares she made the case for intergenerational programming.

"At this point I feel there's a lot of support for an intergenerational piece; [seniors] love the kids; they love the interaction; and they would rather be with the kids than just seniors," she said.

Willmarth, slicing into her mini pizza, agreed: "There are different kinds of old people. There are some that need to interact with young people: it inspires them. There are others where it is not their cup of tea."

The kids, she said, are "really cute."

Surraya, a kid herself, was not so sure.

"Try spending the whole day with them," she said.

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For more information about the Whittier SPICE Intergenerational Center, call 252-1693.