Our AGE AUDIO BIOGRAPHY PROJECT engages senior citizens and captures their life stories and lessons in hard-copy and electronic books. While we create individual biographies, we will also have thematic volumes for senior citizens with experience in specific areas such as public sector leadership, education and business, to contribute biographical chapters that share their personal experiences and institutional lessons.
This project seeks to capture stories directly from the rich experiences of our seniors and document them to preserve history and educate newer generations. This storytelling project will be captured both in writing and in audio-visual format. We would like to mobilize seniors to tell their life stories in whatever forms that can aid proper documentation, and to use the opportunity to encourage everyone else to go back to capturing their “Myself” story, as they may have done in primary school. We would like to use Birthdays as milestones to get our Elders to start, finish and launch or review their autobiographies.
Our project comes at a crucial time where many senior citizens are home alone with limited social interactions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. To get this done, our Elders will need the help of younger family members or friends. It serves as an excellent opportunity for inter-generational interactions that will be mutually beneficial learning exchanges.
In the recent past, we have worked with one of our members, Dr Rosina Acheampong (Archie), to document and launch her autobiography. AGE helped raise funds to support and launch her autobiography. The published e-copy of the autobiography can be found here. With this, we envision that all members will use their birthdays as milestones to share autobiographical accounts of themselves or their life’s experiences.
In the future, with enough funding and support, we hope to expand the project to generate some income for our authors and enhance AGE’s capacity to pursue programs in support of the elderly in the Ghanaian society.