Older men and women need to know how to communicate using computers to compete in the modern workplace. While computing and similar skills are second nature to younger generations, introductory classes are often too quick to cover use of the mouse, keyboard and computer basics for first-time learners or are simply not designed for older learners. As a consequence, many experience early frustration and lose motivation.

During the past five years, Older Adults Technology Services (OATS) and Executive Director Tom Kamber have successfully taught computer skills to more than 4,000 people ages 60 and up. “We have learned a few lessons along the way about what works and what doesn’t,” Kamber says. “For instance, older learners often take a week or two to get comfortable with the mouse and keyboard, so courses that start slowly with these skills are much more effective.  In addition, seniors often benefit from learning in a group setting where they can share their progress with peers and have some fun as well.”

For the hesitant, Kamber offers a few other tips for older beginners:

• Make a commitment to learning. Expect to spend 10 or 20 sessions at the keyboard to start developing confidence with new skills.
• Pace yourself.  Two or three brief sessions a week are much more useful than one marathon class.
• Use a senior-friendly curriculum.  OATS courses are designed specifically for older learners, and this really helps people learn.  If you’re learning at home, you might benefit from the user-friendly book, Is This Thing On?, by Abby Stokes.

OATS has provided trainings at over 30 locations across New York City, and they have found that virtually anyone who wants to take the time to learn a computer can succeed.

The next round of free classes starts in July, so call the enrollment hotline in June for a class near you: 718 502-9203. Or visit the Web site: www.oatsny.org

OATS gives sign-up preference to ReServists to support the program, so when you call, mention your connection to ReServe.

Gary Langley lists “event planner” among the various facets of his professional life.  He is, and has been, responsible for making special occasions, well, special. On Saturday, May 2, it is his job as logistics coordinator to make the Brooklyn Food Conference run as smooth as butter.

Langley has been tending to every detail since January to assure that the day will dawn with volunteers at their stations, guest speakers in place and printed programs at hand so visitors will be entertained, informed and well fed.

Nancy Romer, general coordinator says Langley is “a good match because he’s so skilled at exactly what we need, and he loves the goals of the project.”

The conference is the idea of volunteers at the Park Slope Food Cooperative, where Romer, a longtime social activist, is a member. The co-op, founded in 1973, now claims 15,000 members and is billed as the largest member-worker food coop in the country. The event is to be more than a day-long food festival for families. It is to be a call to area producers for healthful food at affordable prices, an appeal to limit the power of agribusiness and return farming to families, and a forum on how to free the world from the ravages of hunger and obesity.

“Food is a universal organizing issue because it has cultural and personal meaning to all,” Romer says. “Changing the food system is key to addressing climate change, the energy crisis, the health crisis, and poverty.”

The history, she says, is that agribusiness and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) together have bankrupted smaller farms in the United States, Mexico and Central America and made deep cuts in the supply of healthful and affordable food grown closer to home. NAFTA, she says, has allowed U.S. agribusiness to flourish elsewhere as well as undercutting local farmers, forcing farmers off their land in Mexico and Central America. Many of these farmers have fled north, leaving their home countries clueless of best practices regarding soil and climate.

The conference, free to all, is a project of the Brooklyn Food Coalition, an umbrella group of sponsors and partners. It will run along Seventh Avenue in Park Slope between John Jay High School and PS 321.

Featured speakers include Dan Barber, executive chef and co-owner of Blue Hill Restaurant at Kykuit, the Rockefeller Estate; LaDonna Redmond, head of Chicago’s Institute of Community Resource Development; and authors Anna Lappe, Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen, and Raj Patel, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System.

Other attractions along the avenue will include an inaugural New Orleans-style parade featuring huge puppets; 70 workshops on a wide range of topics; food demos; activities for children and teens, food and dance.

Sponsors are Brooklyn’s Bounty, Brooklyn Rescue Mission, Caribbean Women’s Health Association (CWHA), Park Slope Food Coop and World Hunger Year (WHY). More than 120 organizations are partners as diverse as the Center for the Urban Environment, Children’s Aid Society and United Food and Commercial Workers.

The Coalition hopes that everyone takes away something positive from the day, whether it is the opportunity to pet farm animals or churn butter, to learn how to shop and better feed a family, or to be inspired to take action as an individual, as a family, or as part of a group..

Langley is taking away memories of an engaging respite from retirement and of CWHA, his ReServe partner. And he learned that “a group of volunteers, when they get their heads together, can do anything.”

www.brooklynfoodconference.org

ReServist Bill Long at Harlem Community Justice Center

Photo by Kyle Fischer

A deep commitment to mentoring young African-American men and women was key to Bill Long’s becoming a ReServist at the Harlem Community Justice Center. Long signed on in May 2008 as Education Liaison at the center, one of three centers to integrate problem-solving, neighborhood services and counseling programs into the justice system.

John Megaw, a Deputy Project Director who first interviewed Long, said he was impressed by Long’s easy confidence and his skills in working collaboratively and in mentoring. Long says, “I find it easy to mentor young men and women because that was what made a big difference in my life.” His mentor as a young man returned from Marine Corps duty was Ben Malcolm, a New York City Parole Commission officer. The Parole Commission was later abolished and Malcolm moved to the Department of Correction where, in the 1970s he was the first black American to serve as Commissioner. “I never forgot Ben’s positive influence,” Long says, “and so my tribute to him has been to mirror that support for the next generation.”

With Malcolm’s help, Bill went to college and became a teacher, working for the Department of Education for nearly 40 years. Simultaneously, for several years he was an on-call clinician for an outpatient substance abuse program. Although now retired at age 70, Bill continues to volunteer-at the Harlem Community Justice Center and as an on-call sexual assault counselor at Mount Sinai Hospital. In addition he is founder of, and a team coach in, a basketball league for young men in the Justice Center programs.

His raison d’etre at the center, however, is to work in the Juvenile Reentry Network. JRN is supported by the Robin Hood Foundation as a resource for juvenile delinquents returning to the community after up to 18 months of out-of-home placement. The JRN approach reduces re-placement for youth who complete their aftercare supervision,  during which time they are required to adhere to a plan that includes school attendance, weekly meetings before the Judicial Hearing Officer (Una Tapper, also a ReServist), and regular attendance at youth development programming through local Boys & Girls Clubs.  As the Education Liaison, Bill engages each young person’s school to track their progress and problem-solve around challenges. He reports school progress back to the JRN team at weekly case management meetings.

ReServist Bill Long at Harlem Community Justice Center

Photo by Kyle Fischer

Bill and another Reservist, Ruby Harmon, run a weekly adolescent support group, Creating Healthy Adolescent Thinking. Bill brings to CHAT his experiences as a black American male who has lived through the civil rights and black power movements of the 1960s and ‘70s; who has raised a family, earned a living-and given back to his community. Project Director Chris Watler says Bill’s leadership is “an essential connection for our youth to the history of struggle and success that has defined the black experience in America.”  For Bill, his work at the Justice Center is an essential element of his vow to repay his early mentors. “Role models like Ben helped me when I needed it, and I will never forget that,” he says.

ReServist Marilyn Shaw

Photo by Kyle Fischer

Marilyn Shaw is still lean and lithe some 40 years after her hope to become a weekend runner was dashed by creaky knees. Not one to mope, she became a walker, a self-described exercise freak and a volunteer with the New York Road Runners. “I was given a clipboard and asked to ‘check in the volunteers,’” she recalls. “That’s where it all began.”

Marilyn became hooked on helping others and was happy to be in the company of accomplished athletes. She served the Road Runners for 14 years, all the while working at TWA and enjoying employee perks of deep discount travel to distant places when time and space allowed. For the Road Runners, she recruited and coordinated volunteers for weekly road races-and for the New York City Marathon. “This volunteer job became the pathway to my new career after TWA went bankrupt and I was unemployed,” she says.

After years of donating her time to Road Runners, she started getting paychecks for managing volunteers for other major organizations, including the 1992 Democratic Convention in New York, the ‘96 Atlanta Olympics, the ‘98 Goodwill Games, Women’s World Cup Soccer and NYC2012, the organization formed to bid on the 2012 Olympic Games. Now she is in what she calls “semi-retirement” as a ReServist working at the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office.

Marilyn, an extraordinary woman herself, is in the midst of coordinating “Brooklyn’s Extraordinary Women,” an annual program begun in 2007 in which some 31 women are to be honored by the Brooklyn DA’s office next March in conjunction with Women’s History Month. Each nominee must be at least 18 years old and a resident of Brooklyn. Her actions should benefit Brooklyn residents and be beyond paid employment. A special committee composed of staff from the DA’s office and previous honorees will make the final selections.

Before this assignment at the DA’s office, Marilyn was a Reservist for Brooklyn Generation Schools, a model school at South Shore High School, where she was the logistical coordinator for student trips that were part of a college and career readiness program.

Marilyn came to ReServe in 2007 after a frustrating and fruitless search for full-time work.  In 20 job applications prior to becoming a Reservist, “Employers read my resume and I got the interviews, but once they saw me I was out. It’s really a matter of age, not a capability thing. People don’t want [older workers].”  She says that while she and many others have weathered the abuse of ageism in the workplace, she has high hopes for the bumper crop of Baby Boomers. “They just aren’t going to take it.”

At an age on the far side of 50, Marilyn takes special pleasure in working at ReServe. She says it reaffirms her skills.

ReServist Among 50 Honored for ‘Clear and Bold Vision’

ReServist and AARP honoree Cyril Brosnan

Photo by Kyle Fischer

ReServist Cyril Brosnan, who has devoted more than half of his 79 years to helping others, is one of 50 volunteers honored by the NewYork State AARP as part of the organization’s 50^th anniversary celebration.

Each of the 50 honorees, including dancer and choreographer Judith Jamison, Wall Street lioness Muriel Siebert, and ReServe founders Jack Rosenthal and Herb Sturz, was cited for nonprofit service demonstrating “a clear and bold vision for ensuring that New Yorkers can age with vitality, independence, choice and peace of mind.”

For more than 40 years, as a salaried employee or volunteer, Brosnan has been a soft-spoken but relentless pursuer of fair deals for communities in need of assistance. Most often, his drive has been for improved healthcare and housing.

Cyril was born and educated in Chicago, where his Ph.D. research was noted by a New York University economist who later became a secretary to Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. At the secretary’s invitation, in 1967 Cyril joined Rockefeller’s New York State Health Planning Commission.

He moved to the corporate sector in 1973 with Empire BlueCross BlueShield, where he rose to become president of its Health Services Improvement Fund. There he fostered and implemented projects designed to improve the financing, planning, organization and delivery of health care services.

Soon after, he moved into the nonprofit sector, first as a coordinator of the National Committee for Voluntary Sector Leadership on AIDS for the National Health Council, and later as  Director of Public Affairs for the Actors Fund of America. There he not only increased access to health care for entertainment professionals, he also developed housing for performers in need. Simultaneously, Cyril served pro-bono on the boards of several humanitarian organizations, including the Medicare Rights Center, the National AIDS Housing Coalition and the Medical & Health Research Association of New York, now known as Public Health Solutions. He says his tenure at the latter organization taught him particularly valuable lessons in tactics that promote, finance and implement effective health care.

AARP solicited recommendations for its 50^th anniversary awards from individuals and organizations in New York. Cyril was nominated by SAGE (an acronym for Services and Advocacy for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Elders). Brosnan was working at Empire BlueCross BlueShield when he met SAGE Executive Director Ken Dawson at a party and was struck by the group’s purpose to respond to this disturbing statistic: Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender seniors, according to Sage, “may be as much as five times less likely to access needed health and social services because of their fear of discrimination from the very people who should be helping them.”

Dawson wanted volunteers to help SAGE’s constituents, and Cyril became one of the organization’s most active. He began by working as a programmer, advocate and membership recruiter. Then his expertise on housing issues prompted an invitation to the board, where he remained for seven years.

Cyril remains active in providing services to seniors but has resigned from all directorships. “The bureaucratic politics involved,” he explains, “is a real test of one’s serenity.”

As a ReServist, Cyril works at the New York Academy of Medicine. He says he learned about ReServe in Spring 2007 from a lecturer at a conference for advocates. He contacted Claire Haaga Altman, a casual acquaintance and ReServe Executive Director at the time, and applied.  Soon after he had an assignment with NYAM.

“I wanted to be involved with health and human services and implementing change,” he says. But as all ReServists understand, he was no longer willing to work pro bono. He believes that organizations fail to take seriously any effort by someone who works for free, which, of course, is ReServe’s philosophy. Cyril aims to be taken seriously.

At the Academy of Medicine, where he says “it’s a joy to be involved with this work,” he manages forums, focus groups and roundtable discussions-sometimes with several hundred seniors at a time. These groups from a variety of New York communities gather to explain how their communities serve them well and how they don’t.

ReServist Cyril Brosnan with NYAM policy associate Jessica Walker

Photo by Kyle Fischer

Communities fail elders, Cyril says, when streets and parks aren’t clean, when transportation is expensive and hard to access, and when local officials ignore or belittle seniors’ needs. One wry complaint: A park created specifically for seniors lacked bathrooms. Recently such topics have been replaced with the urgent concerns of money and housing.

After an initial round of these sessions, Brosnan’s team drew up a summary report and is helping to organize a summit with New York officials. His team hopes that leaders will appoint a commission to ensure that seniors’ concerns are addressed. Young bureaucrats, Cyril argues, should never presume to know what seniors want or need, nor should they disregard those needs.

With all that Brosnan has accomplished, is there anything he has missed?  “I’m still wishing to be an instrument of change.”