Wayne State Pairs Students With Black Older Adults to Build Digital Skills and Lasting Bonds

Detroit has become the setting for an experiment in bridging two divides at once: the persistent gap in digital access that separates many Black older adults from the online world, and the social distance that too often keeps younger and older generations from truly knowing one another. Wayne State University’s Institute of Gerontology has launched the Intergenerational Wisdom Exchange, known as WiSE, a ten-week program that pairs university students with Black older adults across metro Detroit. The initiative combines structured life-story work with hands-on technology training, betting that the two are most effective when they happen together.

The design of the program unfolds in two distinct phases. During the first half, students and older adults take part in guided life-story activities that move through recognizable chapters of a life: childhood, family and friendships, work and retirement, favorite memories, hopes and dreams, and the wisdom participants want to pass on to future generations. These sessions are not casual conversations but deliberately structured exercises intended to give older adults the opportunity to share and preserve their stories while allowing both sides to build a genuine relationship before any technical instruction begins.

Only after that foundation is laid does the second half of the program turn to technology. Each older adult receives a digital tablet and works one-on-one with a student partner to develop practical digital skills. The curriculum covers a strikingly broad range of modern digital life: using the internet, managing email, navigating social media, joining video calls, shopping online, finding reliable health information, staying safe on the internet, and even understanding generative artificial intelligence. That final topic places the program at the leading edge of digital literacy efforts, acknowledging that AI tools have moved from research labs into everyday platforms that older adults increasingly encounter.

Dr. Rodlescia Sneed, the program’s director and an assistant professor in Wayne State’s Institute of Gerontology and Department of Psychology, has emphasized that the technology is only part of the point. According to Sneed, WiSE is about more than learning how to use devices. The life-story portion, she explains, gives older adults a chance to reflect on and share the experiences that shaped their lives, while giving students the chance to get to know them as people rather than as trainees.

That sequencing reflects a deliberate theory of how learning works across generations. Sneed has described relationship building as an important part of the program’s architecture, noting that by the time participants begin working on digital skills together, they have already developed a meaningful connection and a sense that they have something to learn from one another. In practical terms, this means the tablet lessons are delivered not by a stranger in a classroom but by someone who has just spent weeks listening to the participant’s account of their childhood, their working years, and their hopes for their family.

The program’s focus on Black older adults responds to well-documented disparities in technology access and use. Research on the digital divide has consistently shown that older adults, and particularly Black older adults, face higher rates of disconnection from broadband, devices, and the skills needed to use them confidently. That disconnection carries real consequences in an era when health systems, government services, banking, and social life increasingly assume online access. Finding reliable health information online, one of WiSE’s explicit curriculum topics, is a skill with direct implications for health outcomes, especially for communities that have historically faced barriers within the health care system.

Social connection is the program’s second pillar, and it is treated as an outcome in its own right rather than a byproduct. Loneliness and social isolation among older adults have been recognized as significant public health concerns, associated in the broader research literature with risks to physical and cognitive health. By pairing each older adult with a student for sustained one-on-one interaction over ten weeks, WiSE creates a repeated, scheduled, personally meaningful contact point, a structure that intergenerational program researchers generally view as more promising than one-off volunteer visits.

The initiative is supported by the Retirement Research Foundation for Aging and is not operating in isolation. A sister site at Texas Tech University is running a parallel version of the program that pairs Hispanic older adults with Texas Tech students for similar intergenerational and digital-literacy activities. Running the model at two sites with two different communities allows the researchers to see how the approach adapts across cultural contexts, and it signals that the program’s designers see the underlying structure, story first, then skills, as portable rather than specific to Detroit.

The launch also represents a collaborative effort among university researchers, students, community partners, and older adults themselves. According to Wayne State, the program was developed with input from community members to ensure that its activities are relevant, accessible, and responsive to the experiences and priorities of the older adults it serves. That community-informed design process matters for a program whose success depends on trust: older adults are being asked to share personal life stories and to confront technologies that may feel intimidating, and students are being asked to engage as listeners and partners rather than simply as instructors.

For the students, many of whom are drawn from programs such as Wayne State’s School of Social Work, the exchange runs in both directions. The program’s framing as a wisdom exchange rather than a service model is deliberate: older adults contribute lived experience, perspective, and stories that younger participants rarely encounter in structured settings, while students contribute fluency in the digital tools that have reshaped daily life. If the model works as intended, the tablets and the skills will outlast the ten weeks, but so will the relationships, and both outcomes speak to the same underlying goal of keeping older adults connected to their communities and to the future.

Subject of Research: An intergenerational digital literacy and social connection program for Black older adults in Detroit

Article Title: Wayne State launches WISE Program to strengthen digital literacy and social connection in Black older adults

Article References: Wayne State launches WISE Program to strengthen digital literacy and social connection in Black older adults. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: digital literacy, Black older adults, intergenerational programs, Wayne State University, Institute of Gerontology, social connection, Detroit, digital divide, aging, technology training, Retirement Research Foundation for Aging, life-story activities