Untold Stories of Grief and Joy in Aging

Narratives around aging are often reduced to cliches, limiting opportunities to recognize complexity, diversity, and dignity in aging. To address this gap, in 2025, Portland State University’s GSA Student Chapter organized Untold Stories of Grief and Joy, an arts-based, intergenerational project designed to foster reflection, dialogue, and connection across the lifespan. The project was hosted in an affordable residential community, where eight older adult participants engaged in guided reflection, relationship building, and artistic creation.

About the Project

An interdisciplinary group of student facilitators supported participants in four weekly workshops that featured a new prompt around joy and grief and an art medium (e.g., photography, poetry). Each week, residents shared their artwork and the stories behind it. The project culminated in a community-wide art exhibition where participants displayed their art and shared reflections. The project was evaluated using a focus group with participants, interviews with facilitators, and survey feedback from exhibition attendees.

Main themes included:

• Community building & intergenerational interaction: Residents developed stronger bonds with one another and built new, meaningful relationships with students.
• New beginnings: Participants reframed their perspectives on aging, embracing the possibility of new beginnings at every age.
• Personal experience: The workshops fostered learning, self-exploration, empowerment, vulnerability, healing, and for some, a newfound identity as an artist.
• Workshop themes: Engagement with art, grief and joy, and the aging process provided participants with opportunities to express complex emotions and experiences through creativity and vulnerability.

Project Timeline

• Identify community location & begin participant outreach (MSW practicum site)
• Establish a team of interdisciplinary students (students from the schools of Art & Social Practice, Social Work, and Public Policy)
• Build relationships with participants over time to learn what matters to them (~2 months)
• Design workshop activities based on participant interests, abilities, setting, familiarity with each other, etc
• Conduct workshops (4 weeks)
• Host community art show
• Debrief experience in focus groups and share learnings

PSU Project Leaders

• GSA Student Chapter Members: Jeannette Sager, Anna Gibbons, Max Goldman, Cal Storrs
• Art & Social Practice students: Gwen Hoeffgen, Domenic Toliver, Adela Cardona Puerta
• Faculty support: Serena Hasworth

Next Steps

This project created replicable tools for other GSA Student Chapters to bring this work to long-term care communities, community centers, and other settings. In the future, we hope to expand this project across the Portland area to a diversity of communities at different stages of the aging journey.

We want to thank and give credit to the University of Kansas' Untold Stories of Aging program for inspiring this creative iteration of their work.

For more information about this project or how to get involved, reach out to: betterwithage@pdx.edu.

Photo Gallery