By Gretchen Keiser

(This is the first in a four-part series).

Out of donated office space at the Briarlake Baptist Church in northeast Atlanta, a humming network of activity extends into the surrounding community.

Like a wheel which sends a great deal of motion out from a small core, the organization known as Life Enrichment Services, which will be 10 years old this year, generates from its offices, its many volunteers and from its small paid staff of five people, a lengthy list of accomplishments.

Its Adventures in Learning program – quarterly classes in everything from painting to financial management and advanced French and German – draws 2,000 students a year, all over 50 years of age. A support program for widows and widowers is estimated to be drawing 100 people a month to work their way through the grieving process and to be enabled to turn around and help others in a one-to-one ministry.

Names of older handymen, willing to come out and do minor home repairs, and companion aides, trained to stay with housebound people, are available through LES. A telephone reassurance program is a daily line of comfort and stability to those who live alone and struggle with their vulnerability to accidents and illness. Drivers for Meals on Wheels are recruited and coordinated through affiliate churches.

Weaving through all the programs in as assumption which flies in the face of conventional wisdom – that those who were once called the elderly, and who now, more frequently, have the gentler title of senior citizens, are active, growing and living – for the most part – on their own.

A 1976 demographic study of the Oak Grove neighborhood of northeast Atlanta, where LES serves, showed that there were 7,000 people over the age of 65 within a five-mile radius, according to one of the founders, and that most were living in their own homes, were well educated and were still driving. The study gave impetus to a program which 10 years later is still thriving on the assumption that older people are active and open to new challenges.

“It’s going against the grain of societal values – that old people are set in their ways, that they can’t learn new things,” said Pam Buckmaster, who coordinates outreach programs for the elderly at Catholic Social Services. “That’s a myth.”

Not only is LES thriving after 10 years, but similar programs, modeled on the same concept, are growing in four Atlanta neighborhoods and in Sandy Springs and Dunwoody, Hapeville and Marietta.

“In 1900 the life expectancy was 47 years,” said Anne Eaton, a 78-year-old German native who was one of the co-founders of LES in 1976. “Now the life expectancy is 76 years and for women it’s something like 82. It’s a fallacy to think that the majority of older people sit at home and do nothing.”

According to those who work with senior citizens, the new awareness about structuring programs and working “with” older people rather than designing programs “for” them came about in 1972 through the work of a Kansas City Methodist minister, Dr. Elbert Cole. The congregation “hired a management company to find out what they could do for the elderly,” Mrs. Eaton said. “They found out what everybody already knew. Only five percent of the elderly live in institutions at any one time.”

Dr. Cole’s congregation designed a program known as The Shepherd’s Center with the belief that “older people primarily are a potential resource for the enrichment of the life of the community rather than a social problem to be solved.”

The original program, and others based on it, like Life Enrichment Services, operate on the assumption that older people possess “skills, experience, wisdom, matured judgement which can be called upon for service.” They must take on a “central role in the organization, governance, and operation of the Shepherd’s Centers.” Since old people are looked upon in a positive, gifted light, at places modeled upon this concept, the neighborhood is the center of activity and ministry and people are asked to look after and help one another. Churches, in ecumenical cooperation, are at the heart of the success of the program, providing donated space and a community consciousness and value system upholding the worth of people at all ages. At LES, Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish, Holy Cross Church and Corpus Christi Church are among nearly 60 affiliates.

Geneva Broadhurst, a highly active volunteer at LES, who admits to being a few months away from the age of 72, but not to being a “senior citizen,” says that her work as coordinator of the widowed persons service has “literally, literally, literally changed my life.”

Widowed at 56, after 38 years of marriage, Mrs. Broadhurst says she was fortunate in that, unlike many widows, she had taken care of the family finances. Having grown up on a farm, she was comfortable fixing things around the house and working with machinery. But none of that prepared her for the emotional impact of her husband’s death. “I was in shock,” she says. “All my friends were still married or divorced. I didn’t have anybody I could talk to and I needed to talk to somebody about my feelings.”

Like many who find their way to programs like LES, she felt herself cut off from her former circle of friends because those who were married and her husband’s business associates were people whose presence reopened the wounds of grief.

After struggling without much support, she heard of a training course for those working with the widowed sponsored by DeKalb County and took it. She later became the co-founder and president for three years of a support organization for the widowed known as EGRESS. In 1980 she was asked to coordinate the widowed persons service for LES, which she does as a volunteer, and says that the program has helped thousands of people move from grief into the ability to help others through training in ministry to other widows and widowers.

“I can bring them from tears, to smiles, to laughter, to involvement with other people, to wanting to live again,” she said. “I consider myself as a role model to other widowed people – I did it. You can do it.”

Sparkle-eyed with trim brown hair, Mrs. Broadhurst says that “my life has as much meaning and purpose as it did” when she was a wife, mother and homemaker. Now that she has accepted the “new beginning” that came after her husband’s death 16 years ago she says, “I never think of myself as how old I am. I have as much energy, enthusiasm and zest for living as I ever have.”

Admitting happily to a social life which includes dating and dancing several nights a week, she is also a volunteer visitor at nursing homes and a sitter who stays not only with children, but also with elderly parents who are living with adult sons and daughters.

With a father who is 92 years old and a father-in-law who is 98 years old, she enjoys “talking about how things used to be” with the elderly people she sits for. “I call them senior citizens,” she says.

Like Geneva Broadhurst, LES’ co-founder Anne Eaton began a new life at what is considered to be retirement age. A native of Germany who fled to the United States with her husband, Paul, in 1938 prior to World War II, Mrs. Eaton raised a family and worked as a methods analyst and efficiency expert for Atlanta businesses and only in her sixties began to be a volunteer and then worker with the elderly in nursing homes.

A television interview she viewed with the director of Georgia State University’s gerontology program, Dr. Barbara Payne, led to her taking seminars after the age of 65. At one session Dr. Payne asked whether any older person would be willing to enter the master’s degree program in gerontology and Mrs. Eaton said yes, on the spot. She graduated when she was nearly 70 years old and, in the process, met and formed the nucleus, with H. Mack Love, Judson Green and Robert W. DuBose of Oak Grove United Methodist Church, of those who founded LES.

Adventures In Learning, the education component which is taught by volunteer teachers, mostly older people, was the first activity launched. “We started off with 147 people at Clairmont Presbyterian Church,” one of the affiliate churches who donate space for classes, Mrs. Eaton said. “Now we have over 2,000 people a year in Adventures in Learning.”

Serving those 50 years of age and older, under executive director Jeannine Kingry, LES now has two educational units which hold classes every Thursday in two locations. Topics change quarterly, but include courses that draw seniors into developing talents in the arts, foreign languages, current events, financial matters and recreation. In addition to stimulating new learning, the Thursday classes bring people together for lunch and a forum, which create congeniality and closeness, Mrs. Eaton said.

In addition to the seniors working as teachers and as one-on-one support to widows and widowers, others donate time at the office and as drivers for Meals on Wheels, and others support special fund-raising events with their time and expertise. In the most recent annual report, LES estimated that over 38,900 volunteer hours were given in 1985 at a value estimated at more than $130,000. A fund-raising campaign is now underway for a building to be located on the grounds of Briarlake Baptist Church.

Mrs. Eaton believes that the success stems from the fact that the center identified the real needs of older people in the Oak Grove area and saw that they were active and willing to serve. “Once you join LES, you’re committed – it hooks you,” she says, admitting that even in her own case she is finally “retiring” to work with special projects only at 78.

Mrs. Broadhurst said that “the secret of happiness is doing for others.”

“You have energies to give, but unless you direct them correctly, you’ll never get anything back,” she said, saying that the “first thing” she advises the newly widowed to do is “to try to volunteer and be helpful to someone in some way.”

In addition to the support work with one another, the widowed group meets in gatherings of 40 to 50 people to “eat and go to a show together” on the weekends, which is the most difficult time for the widowed, she said. And they have hiking trips, including a planned 15-mile hike in the Smokey Mountains. “And you tell me life’s not exciting,” she exclaimed, with a gleam in her eyes.

Acknowledging that she is very fortunate in having her health and physical stamina intact, Mrs. Broadhurst said that she believed the well-being was sustained by giving and receiving love and support.

“I feel God comforted me not to make me comfortable, but to be a comforter to others,” she said, “and that’s what I’ve been trying to do.”