Bridges at Home
Bridges provides an intentional community connection for high school students, college students, and adults of all ages to build intergenerational relationships through meaningful conversations around relevant topics.
Welcome to Bridges at Home!
Have you ever noticed a disconnect between the generations of people in your parish? Have you ever been unsure of how to approach someone in a different age demographic at coffee hour? Would you be alarmed if you were asked to speak to your parish teen group? And, deeper than that: do you know the struggles and joys of someone in their teens? Their 30s? Their 70s? The YES Bridges online Series started as a YES Internship Experience project by Eleni Lewis in 2022 to meet this very need! Through the YES Program, we have been able to bring together over (x) amount of people over the last 2 years to purposefully dig into intergenerational connections and relationships. In the YES Bridges online Series, we used an online platform to bring together a large range of teens, young, middle-aged and older adults to listen to a speaker’s reflection on a particular topic, such as “Bringing Everyone to the Table” and “Coffee Hour 101.” Afterwards, participants had powerful group discussions, and even got individually paired up with a person of a different generation as a “Bridge Buddy” to connect and spend time together. Some Bridge Buddies still keep in contact to this day from across the country. Bridges was so successful that we’ve continued it and made it available for any parishes to participate in their own community!
Bridges is meant to inspire and encourage community, and is meant to help us grow in our understanding of ourselves and others. This is not a “program” for you to do by yourself. You could certainly watch the video library alone, but would be missing an essential component. We encourage you to use Bridges to help “bridge” communication between you and at least one other person. Bridges could be used parish-wide or with small groups in a parish. Bridges would work best with in-person connection, but was started virtually and can easily adapt to either format.
Getting Started
After getting the blessing of your parish priest, think about how you could best organize Bridges for your parish. Here are some things to consider:
- Who are you hoping to bring together? Are you going to open this up to your whole parish? Are you going to invite a couple specific groups of people to start with? Maybe the girls in your teen group and your women’s group?
- Where will you spend your time together? The church seems like the natural option, but within that think of where best you could hold this gathering? Depending on how many people you have, maybe a cozier space within your church might work well. Or perhaps if you have a lot of people you could start in the hall together and then divide into break-out groups into smaller classrooms. Think of spaces that will be conducive to larger group and smaller group discussions. If you have a smaller group, consider asking one of the participants to open up their home to bring people together to connect.
- When will you invite people to come together? We have found that Bridges works well with a short-term commitment, but longer than one week. We have found that three weekly sessions back-to-back works well, but there might be different timing that works better for your parish. You will also want to consider if a weeknight evening might get the best attendance, or if you connect it with something already happening at your parish, say following Great Vespers on Saturday nights. Ideally you will have all the people who sign up to come for each session, so aim to choose a day/time that would work for many people. Because you will want to divide people into groups over the course of the time together, it is helpful to have people sign up in advance.
Planning Bridges
To begin planning Bridges at Home, please click on this button to access our planning document!
After Bridges
Once you’ve completed a 3-week series of Bridges (or whatever time frame you’ve chosen for your parish) you will hopefully notice new relationships and stronger connections between parishioners. This is a beautiful thing for the life of your parish and the Church as a whole! You might be wondering: what next?
Hopefully these relationships will continue to flourish on their own, and perhaps even snowball into more relationships or ideas within your parish! We love to see how each individual and each parish has so much creativity and ability to grow and serve in their own communities. If you are in need of more ideas for where your parish could go next:
Any Questions? Contact Elizabeth Ayoub at eayoub@focusna.org!
