In a first for Maryland, a college and a senior living facility will occupy some of the same space.

Edenwald Senior Living, in Towson, plans to add 127 new units in three apartment towers that will be built on land leased from Goucher College on its campus.

Edenwald residents will be able to take part in cultural programing on the college campus, participate in intergenerational study abroad programs and audit Goucher courses.

Goucher students, the college says, will benefit from mingling with older adults in a myriad of ways, including the potential for mentorship and networking and developing intergenerational interpersonal skills that are increasingly important in the workplace.

“We wanted a way to have our young people have greater interaction with older adults,” said Kent Devereaux, the president at Goucher. “Edenwald has a lot of retired professors, retired researchers, retired executives, these people have amazing life experiences.”

And, “the more you keep your mind engaged, the better your health is,” he added.

The program will begin in earnest in 2025, with three co-generational courses and a co-generational study abroad trip to Scotland. Goucher students will receive academic credit for the courses.

Groundbreaking for the new Edenwald tower on leased Goucher land is slated for the end of 2026. The college did not disclose the terms of the 99-year lease.

Relearning the lost arts

Edenwald and Goucher already have a combined history — the senior living community is built on land acquired from Goucher College in 1985.

Seniors living at Edenwald already have access to the Goucher campus, and often walk the paths for exercise, visit art galleries or work as ushers at campus events.

Joan McMahon, an Edenwald resident, said the senior population there is “very hungry” for mental stimulation, whether through teaching or learning. In addition to the opportunities to learn at Goucher — visiting for lectures, auditing courses, taking in cultural performances — the college and Edenwald are working on strengthening opportunities for the seniors to share what they know.

There are students at Goucher, McMahon said, who want to “learn the lost arts” — skills that are no longer regularly taught in classrooms, like knitting, quilting and journal-writing.

“They come to our studios to interact with the residents who know how to do all that,” McMahon said.

Sam Koseff, a student at Goucher, said they’ve been “accidentally” involved in the burgeoning partnership between Goucher and Edenwald from the start.

Koseff was taking a class on arts in the community, which involved the students interviewing centenarians at Edenwald and turning their stories into artwork. After a presentation of the projects, Koseff and McMahon connected.

Both, since then, have been involved in mapping how the relationship between Goucher and Edenwald will look for students.

“I’m excited by the idea that we’re creating sort of the found family of it. I feel like I have a little surrogate grandmother in Joan,” Koseff said.

Creating a ‘co-generational environment’

University retirement communities — like the one developing between Goucher and Edenwald — are not a new concept. There are others, like Lasell Village in Massachusetts or Mirabella at ASU in Arizona.

But other university retirement communities, Devereux said, are farther from the college campuses.

“In this case, we’re saying, ‘We’re right next to each other. What if we really pushed the boundary?’ You can walk out the front door and be on a brick path that takes you right to campus,” he said. “There’s no parking lot, there’s no fence.”

Mark Beggs, the president and CEO of Edenwald, said there’s a lot of excitement in the senior living community when it comes to getting more involved with life at Goucher.

“A lot of communities are so segregated from the world around them. A lot of retirement communities across the country are on 100 acres in the middle of nowhere,” Beggs said. The proximity between Goucher and Edenwald creates “this great opportunity to create a co-generational environment where people in their 80s are able to hang out and have interactions every day with people who are 18-24.”

Constructing the new buildings on Goucher’s campus will take time — and involve rerouting the main gatehouse at the entrance to the school. Goucher College is not contributing to the cost of construction.

Residents at Edenwald who choose to audit classes won’t be able to register until Goucher students have. The college’s study abroad office is tweaking models for the programs it offers so Edenwald residents who travel internationally don’t reduce the number of spots available for Goucher students.

The school is also ensuring faculty are prepared to run multigenerational classrooms, and will run orientations to make sure Edenwald residents are prepared for what life is like on a college campus in the 2020s — including instruction on technology use, an overview of Title IX and conventions for race, gender, pronouns and ethnicity.

Koseff, who is nonbinary, said Goucher has a large population of transgender students, and it’s important to them that there’s a “safety net” around protecting those students.

So far, Koseff said, it hasn’t been a problem.

And even in the rare cases where Koseff said they’ve been misgendered, people at Edenwald have been “so extremely kind” about it.

“My nose ring causes more of an issue than anything,” Koseff said.