2016-17 Hejiata Neighborhood 2th group 何家塔社区 老漂的新家 2组

The Hejiata project is one of the XJTLU community engagement spring project which has the purpose to help the migrant seniors to integrate into the community quickly. The Hejiata community is located in the downtown of Suzhou. With the development of Suzhou in the aspect of economic and environment, more and more young people would like to find jobs and develop themselves in Suzhou. Their parents have no choice to move to Suzhou because they want to live close to their children.

This project can be deemed as a way to analysis the current situation of the senior migrants in China content and the major issues in relation to those senior migrants. Additionally, this project is not only about the research but also committee to the social promotion in this neighborhood. Thus, the second main purpose of this project is to help the new coming senior migrants in this neighborhood to adapt this new environment, new city, changed climate condition, distinctive culture background that is far away from their hometown, and even the new dialect (Suzhou dialect) that they are not used to it. In term of the Chinese content, senior migrants is a prominent issues. Since the Hukou policy, one child policy, rapid urbanization and aging problem, increasing number of senior had to leave their home along with their child coming to the mega city and living in this unknown and unfamiliar places. However, this kind of trend has resulted in multiple negative impact for example the augment feeling of anonymity between the local residents and migrants, reducing the sense of community and increasing the anxiety. As we can see, this minority group has the need to be highly concern in the long term. Therefore, the main domain that the students has worked in based on those main purpose and current issues of the senior migrants is essentially focus on the research and social practice.

This project combines the workers in the community center and students in the XJTLU to hold some activities to help the migrant senior to communicate more with neighbors. Some interesting games are used as ice breaking activities such as clipping the table tennis and doing aerobics (figure 1 and 2). Some meaningful activities are also hold, for example, listening the tea ceremony class and learning using the mobile phone (figure 3 and 4).

(figure 1)

(figure 2)

(figure 3)

(figure 4)

The major task for the students: first of all the recruitment work. Volunteers are be assigned to convince local senior migrants to involve in this project. After the recruitment part, the main responsibilities are making the plan for the following activities, coming up some ideas about the main topic for each discussion, assisting each activities and documenting the main information.

• The first stage of the project ----- recruitment:

Volunteers invite residents to attend the community activities.

• The second stage ------- get acquaintance

Volunteers helps the residents to learn dancing for the first time and enhance their relationship

• The third stage ----- doing variety activities

1. Volunteers teach residents to use popular mobile phone app

 

After several times implements, we found that lots of those senior migrants are more and more willing to join in this kind of activity, willing to sharing their life experiences. There is a reflection of accumulating time on them and they all have their own unique story to tell. Although we only have held 4 times activities but, the number of participants are increasing, which is a good sign to show that those migrants are happy about these kind of project and they seems very enjoy it. Initially we only recruit around 15 people but in the 4^th Dragon Boat Festival preparation there are around 40 participants. Those senior migrants bring their friends to come here.

Also, during the each activities, we give those senior migrants the opportunities to share their own story, childhood memory or their family story. They are not only share those experience but also chat with their new friends and form the new social network meanwhile.

The main achievements that we think is that we give them a platform for the senior migrants to enlarge their social network and add some interesting and different memory in their routine daily life. The outcome is seems to be invisible in short term but we believe it does improve their inner world in the long run.