Steve Kurland
Nov 18, 2023
Aiding Generations is a 501(c)3 non-profit and our mission is to find underserved teens careers in the rapidly growing and understaffed senior living industry. We have come a long way in two years and are on the brink of bringing our vision to fruition.
Aiding Generations’ creation began in the fall of 2021 when I started pursuing my master’s degree at Boston University’s School of Hospitality Administration. After thirty-plus years away from college, I was deep into my hospitality career, having started as a dishwasher at Friendly’s at sixteen years old and progressing to a partnership in Za and EVOO restaurants in Cambridge and Arlington, MA.
I decided to pursue a core group of classes in Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the first innovation class I took was “Innovation and Disruption in Hospitality,” taught by Professor Diane Dillon. To take us out of our comfort zones (all our group members had restaurant backgrounds), we were challenged to bring innovation to the senior living industry. After some research, we realized that senior living offers gigantic opportunities. As the baby boomers and Gen Xers age, senior living is growing rapidly, almost too rapidly for the industry to keep up with.
We discovered three areas of opportunity based on the industry’s growth and inability to find staff.
First, there were not enough young leaders.
Second, there was not much diversity at the management level and even less in the C-suite.
Third, the hiring difficulty was bringing very high costs.
After some brainstorming with my partners, I proposed the idea of a “City Corps for Senior Living”. We called this new company “Senior Corps”. City Corps is a non-profit group in many cities around the country. They bring in diverse 18 to 20-year-olds and teach them about working in public school systems. The workers are then deployed in various schools in the area as helpers, hoping to spark their interest in becoming educators. City Corps workers are given a stipend as payment. My idea was to bring underserved teens to the senior living industry area in a similar way. The biggest difference I saw was that senior living had the financial resources to pay well and offer career advancement.
If you had asked me about my interest in the senior living industry before this course, I would have said “almost none”, but, after this project, I was becoming intrigued. The following semester, this project would gain momentum and I would find important supporters and partners.
Check out the progress in Part 2, coming soon.