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Innov Aging
Innov Aging
innovateage
Innovation in Aging
2399-5300 Oxford University Press US 

10.1093/geroni/igaa057.2209
igaa057.2209
Abstracts
Session 5855 (Symposium)
AcademicSubjects/SOC02600
Creativity’s Impact on Aging and Health, 1970–2010
Miller Wendy  
Create Therapy Institute, Kensington, Maryland, United States
2020 
16 12 2020 
16 12 2020 
4 Suppl 1 Program Abstracts from The GSA 2020 Annual Scientific Meeting “Turning 75: Why Age Matters”643 643
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America.2020This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Abstract
In the 1970, practitioners in the arts, aging, health, social work and allied therapeutic professions became pioneers in a newly formed movement of creative aging. Robert Butler’s “Why Survive? Growing Old in America” called for rethinking aging and the services needed to support the growing aging population. Barriers to restrictions and the lower expectations around how older people could live in their communities began to change. Opportunities for engagement in the humanities and the arts began to be tailored to support older people’s life style and to accommodate the sharing of their life experiences in new ways through partnerships with schools and senior centers. The rise of these practices promoted the first multi-year study of arts engagement impact on the health on older adults and a wave of publications and new research studies followed. These were the foundation for this strength-based initiative across the spectrum of aging.