'How to Catch Ageism' Series - No 1: Language

'How to Catch Ageism' Series - No 1: Language

Join us for a free workshop exploring the language of ageism - how we can change it & culture new phrases & perspectives free from ageism

By Flourishing Lives

Date and time

Tuesday, June 10 · 3 - 4:30am PDT

Location

Online

About this event

  • Event lasts 1 hour 30 minutes

Flourishing Lives, the Flourishing Lives Advisory Group (FLAG), Dave Martin and Hannah McDowall of Canopy invite you to our free online workshop.

Join us to put our language under the microscope and explore how the stealthy ‘infection’ of ageism, carried in the words we use, spreads and contaminates our experience of life. But how can we change it? Together we will try to culture new phrases and perspectives that create the best conditions for us to healthily ‘digest’ the flow of life, free from the limiting beliefs of ageism.

Like the bacteria in our guts, social norms and attitudes attach themselves to us across our lifecourse from the moment we are born and without us even noticing. Some of these attitudes support the healthy digestion of our life experiences as time flows on, and some of them like Ageism interfere with it.

Ageism is a very common attitudinal ‘gut bacteria’, indeed it looks like almost everyone carries it. Perhaps the impacts of ageism on your ability to digest life are low level and chronic or even acute at times, or perhaps you are one of the very rare asymptomatic people?

In this workshop we will ask:

  • what is the effect of these attitudes on our ability to live joyfully and honestly in our ageing skin?
  • And how can we feed the good ‘anti-ageism bacteria’ with words that nourish and aid the digestion of time as it flows through us?


Join us for an interactive experience where we’ll have fun exploring ageist language and an opportunity to create healthy alternative ageing communication.


About Dave Martin and Hannah McDowall
Since 2013 Dave and Hannah have worked to create experiences, artworks and coalitions, which help us to disrupt current approaches to ageing. These ‘disruptions’ fall into 3 broad themes

1. Life course thinking and intergenerational connectivity

2. Transitions thinking not Age thinking

3. Exposing the ageist attitudes we hold against ourselves and others


Canopy is a not for profit organisation who work with communities, organisations and ecosystems to design and facilitate collective imagination projects which nurture belonging, courage and hope.

Canopy was set up to grow the social imagination. We believe that without new and shared imaginations our society will stay stuck in its current destructive and unequal patterns. We know that all of us are deeply imaginative, but society is not set up to support us to imagine together. The result is that we’re always building the future based on imaginations that are incomplete, one-sided and disconnected. This is what we seek to change. We seek to create the conditions for new shared imagining, new stories and new action for a better world.

Organized by

Flourishing Lives is a London-wide coalition of organisations taking a creative, relational approach to supporting richer, more independent lives for older people. 

We believe that building quality relationships is the heart of our work - genuinely engaging with older people as unique individuals and forming close bonds with the dedicated staff and volunteers who work alongside them.

We connect practitioners, day centres, major arts organisations, health & fitness initiatives and community outreach programmes so that knowledge, research and resources can be shared and the very highest level of practice can be established across the sector.

We are very grateful to The National Lottery Community Fund and the Baring Foundation for funding our work.

Free