Dear Friends,
Happy New Year! We in the Ibasho family wish you all the best for a healthy and happy 2013, and look forward to an exciting year ahead!
As we look back at 2012, we have much to be grateful for, especially the support and encouragement we have received from supporters like you. And it has paid off!
We started Ibasho in 2010 with just a few people but great passion and a belief that we can make a difference. And we have already made meaningful progress and captured the attention of communities around the world that are grappling with the universal question of how we can all age with dignity and live purposeful lives, no matter what our age.
2012 was a busy year, but a few highlights stand out. In April, Dr. Power and I received a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to develop a project called “An Innovative Response to Global Aging: Creating Resilient Communities for All”. Thanks to the Foundation’s generous support, I spent four incredible weeks at the Bellagio Center in Italy with some of the world’s most innovative thinkers in a variety of fields, honing our ideas and developing our plans. And we have seen these ideas get traction even where we are not working. In July, I was invited to talk about Ibasho at the World Cities Summit in Singapore, and media in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and China featured Ibasho and our work, helping us reach people well outside our small (but growing!) circle. And, finally, in November we broke ground for a new, community sponsored “Ibasho Cafe” in Ofunato, Iwate Japan, a small Japanese coastal town devastated by the tsunami of 2011.
This Ibasho Cafe is in many ways the ideals and principles of Ibasho made concrete for the first time. This project, which will create an “Ibasho” for this town and particularly its elders, has been embraced by the local citizens and is now really their project. We supplied ideas and support, but they have made it their own, bringing in local artisans to build the cafe itself and establishing a new non-profit organization to run it. When the Cafe opens in spring, 2013, it will be a place where the elders of the community can work and congregate, but it will also be a place for the entire community to gather. Throughout the project, we have been encouraged not only by the enthusiasm of the elders we work with, but also by the energy and excitement of the young people in the community.
What we’ve discovered through all of this work is that although the Ibasho initiative started just with planning for better elder care in an aging societies, we are reaching people of all ages, and addressing issues that are relevant to all communities. We have realized that concerns about living with dignity and contributing to one’s community are not just relevant to today’s elders, but also to those who are young.
In 2013, we look forward to even more progress, exploring how we can better connect our elders to our communities, and ensure they never lose their sense of purpose, while at the same time engaging young people in creating projects that speak to and serve multiple generations. The opening of the Ibasho Cafe in Ofunato, Japan in spring 2013 will be an important step toward this goal, but we hope, only one of many.
And so, with gratitude for your support and excitement for the year ahead, I wish you all the best for 2013
