Members of the Rhode Island House of Representatives met last Wednesday at the Pilgrim Senior Center,  far from their usual chambers. 

Speaker of the House Joe Shekarchi was joined by members of the General Assembly’s Older Adult Rhode Islanders Commission. The study commission, chaired by Rep. Lauren Carson and includes Pilgrim Senior Center Director Meg Underwood, was at the PSC for their second of three community sessions throughout the state. Previously, they had held a session in Carson’s home city of Newport; their next meeting will be in South Kingstown on Oct. 18.

“Usually, we don’t bring many sessions in the field,” Carson said. “This time, the Speaker suggested that we bring some of these sessions in the field so that aging Rhode Islanders can see government, how it works, and they can see how study commissions work,” Carson said.

The General Assembly, Shekarchi said, has worked over the past few years on legislation focusing on issues important to older Rhode Islanders, including a bill that passed this year making it easier to build accessory dwelling units (ADUs).

The focus of this particular meeting was ageism and its effects on Rhode Island’s older population. Carson said that as the commission hopes to learn  ways state government can help older Rhode Islanders, it focuses on different topics pertaining to improving the quality of life for older adults in each session, including housing, transportation and the affordability of medical care.

“At our last meeting, it really struck me that we should spend a little more time talking about this,” Carson said. “Aging Rhode Islanders are not all in nursing homes, lying in their beds. Many of them- most of them- are in our community like you are. They have challenges, they’re trying to age with dignity, trying to participate in their community. And I think we as policymakers particularly need to change the dial a bit about the way we think about older Rhode Islanders.”

Phillip Clark, Director of the Program of Gerontology at URI, gave a presentation about the language and cultural expectations of aging. Clark said one of the most important things he teaches students is “If you’ve seen one older person, you’ve seen one older person”- meaning that people have a wide variety of different experiences with aging.

“Older people are more unlike each other than any other group, they’re less heterogeneous, because they’ve had a whole lifetime to become different,” Clark said.

With that diversity of experiences, Clark emphasized that negative stereotypes of older people were important to combat. A major change, he said, is that those negative attitudes often existed in older adults themselves.

Semantics, he said, are important in changing attitudes. He and urged people to stop using words with negative connotations. That, he said, included the word “senior” itself.

“Language matters,” Clark said. “How you use language to describe older adults and groups, how to express that, is important. I think we’re on the right track.”

Carson said that Clark’s presentation and insights were helpful, and said she might have him advise the committee on aging-related matters in the future.

Clark said he feels groups including the General Assembly are moving in the right direction on age-related issues, and making sure people could have the support of the government to age gracefully was an issue of extreme importance.

“Older adults are the result of an incredible success,” Clark said. “We are keeping people alive longer, keeping them healthier in larger numbers.”