Gerontology Institute to Host Talk on ‘Forgotten Caregivers’

The Gerontology Institute Distinguished Speaker Series will feature a talk on Thursday, October 5, by Meredith Minkler, professor of health and social behavior at the University of California, Berkeley. Winkler’s lecture, "Forgotten Caregivers: American Grandparents Raising Their Grandchildren," will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Emerson Suites, Phillips Hall. The lecture is free and open to the public; a reception will follow.

The founding director of the University of California Center on Aging and a member of the AARP’s Grandparent Information Center, Minkler also cofounded the Tenderloin Senior Organizing Project, a nationally known empowerment model for working with low-income elderly. She has conducted extensive research on elderly people who are providing primary care for their grandchildren––a demographic change she calls one of the most remarkable in American society in the last few decades––and coauthored a national study, "The Health of Grandparents Raising Grandchildren," which was published in the American Journal of Public Health in 1999.

"The number of children living with grandparents jumped 44 percent in the 1980s," she says. "In many parts of the country the foster care system would collapse if it were not for the work of the older generation."

Minkler has received several awards, including the Distinguished Mentorship Award from the Gerontological Society of America and a Kellogg National Fellowship. She has worked as a consultant with the Ford Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, and the White House Conference on Aging.

For more information call the Gerontology Institute at 274-1967.