‘It’s given me a focus other than COVID’: Art Your Service teaches bored, locked down seniors new skills and helps them stay social – Toronto Star

In a terrible time for older populations in Canada and around the world, Art Your Service is a ray of light.

Run by Whitby-based arts professional and entrepreneur Jen Tindall, Art Your Service offers twice-daily online arts and fitness classes for seniors, as well as a popular Friday afternoon social hour.

Seniors access the classes via seniors centres and municipalities, which buy group memberships for $125 a month; or they can take up individual memberships, which cost $19.99 a month. There is also a limited number of free subscriptions for those on a constrained budget.

Classes range from chair Pilates to painting to music therapy, with classes at 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. daily. Tindall started the service in August last year and there are now 300 daily subscribers, most from southern Ontario but some from farther afield: Atikokan in northwestern Ontario, Calgary and New Jersey.

“It’s given me a focus other than COVID,” says Veronika Brath, who takes many of the Art Your Service fitness and wellness classes, and teaches one of its painting courses. “When I joined and I discovered all these other talents going on, I really wanted to be a part of it.”

Tindall, who worked at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre for 14 years, first had the idea to start up creative classes for seniors a few years ago when she was helping her aunt choose an assisted living residence and found that many activity calendars “were kind of lacking” when it came to arts programming. There was “a lot of bingo, a lot of crafts, and things that I felt were infantile or not appropriate for somebody that’s lived an interesting life,” said Tindall. An initial plan to bring classes into centres proved too ambitious for a start-up business, so Tindall developed a program called “Cultivating Gratitude” that seniors residences and centres could buy and implement themselves.

The COVID-19 pandemic has allowed Tindall to realize her initial vision of offering classes directly to seniors. Initially concerned that online participation might be a barrier, she was reassured when a one-off, arts-oriented online party she organized last June, called the “Golden Hour,” attracted 300 senior participants. “That’s when we understood that they were willing to embrace the technology,” said Tindall.

Many of the members had become familiar with Zoom as the only way to maintain contact with family and friends. Tindall also makes participation as straightforward as possible. There’s no advance registration required for individual classes; she emails the Zoom links to members every day and is present at every class. “I think the thread of why this works so well is that I host everything,” she said. “Everybody sees me the whole time. I introduce everybody; I let everybody in and out and we always have a chat after all the classes. So there’s a feeling of familiarity.”

“I think it’s the first step that is always the hardest,” said Brath. “The first step to go to Zoom, the first step to do a dance move, the first step to lift up a paintbrush. All of those things are challenging. And once you do, and you get familiar with it, then it’s not as intimidating.”

Judy MacLean found out about Art Your Service through the Hillsview Active Living Centre in Georgetown and takes many of the fitness classes. It’s a way to stay in touch with friends from the centre; she and a group of three or four others plan their attendance together and make a point of attending the Friday social.

“We do a lot of things together and now we even have our own Zoom get-togethers,” said MacLean. “We had a Zoom Christmas party and New Year’s Eve party.”

MacLean lives at home on her own and has brief, distanced face-to-face contact with her sister, who lives nearby, two or three times a week. Art Your Service has become an important social outlet. “It’s really hard because I’m not used to staying home and I’ve basically been home for a year,” said MacLean.

Tindall identified the Art Your Service teachers through word of mouth and networking. Some heard about the project in the media and got in touch; others have been recommended by existing instructors. One of the teachers is Tindall’s cousin.

Chair Pilates teacher Julia DeSotto found her way to Art Your Service via Tom Carson of Smile Theatre, which offers a social session featuring music, dance and storytelling on Tuesdays. “Smile Theatre has a wonderful connection with seniors and was telling me about this and I said, ‘Oh my gosh, I would love to come on board,’” said DeSotto.

While Pilates has a lot to offer seniors — strength, training, balance — the benefits to participants are much more than physical, DeSotto said. “At the end of class, we have a little discussion to get feedback and stuff, because you can’t talk during the class — they turn their mics off … I send them a lot of love and they send it back to me, and we go on for the next week. That hour is very important to them because, right now, that’s what they have.”

Extending the networking even further, DeSotto’s daughter, Katrina Gall, a trained chef and wine professional, teaches an Art Your Service cooking class on Wednesdays.

For participant Margaret Teasdale, Art Your Service has allowed her to try things she might not have previously. Before she started taking a weekly painting class, “I would have said I can’t even draw a stick man. And now I’m telling Jen, ‘You think I can do art?’”

Teasdale appreciates the flexibility of the service, which provides not only live classes but access to a video library of past classes. Watching pre-recorded painting classes “allows me to stop and start and then, if the teacher is not going fast enough, I can fast-forward,” she said.

But Teasdale also finds value in the live classes, which allow her, like MacLean, to stay connected with friends from her senior centre. “I could take classes on YouTube, but it’s not the same thing,” she said. “I don’t know those people.”

Those connections now run deeper than being occasional classmates; Art Your Service has become a community.

Most of my interviewees mention a 90-year-old participant in Georgetown who is a devoted member but stopped turning up to classes earlier in the year. Tindall became concerned and asked around, and his neighbours who are also Art Your Service members were able to call him and find out that his internet service had gone down. “I never know who’s going to show up, but I know when they’re not there,” says Tindall.

Art Your Service is not yet paying for itself, but Tindall says it’s growing fast and that it brings her many other benefits: “I get it back, because they are so happy.”

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