Some come to MEA as a student and then become a facilitator or guest faculty member as Elizabeth White has done. I was so honored to feature her on my most recent Midlife Chrysalis podcast episode, entitled “The New Way Women Over 50 Are Choosing to Live.”
I first got to know Elizabeth based upon her viral essay, “You Know Her,” that led to her book, “55, Unemployed, and Faking Normal,” and all kinds of media including this piece on the PBS NewsHour. Elizabeth has documented that as women graduate into their “big age” – full of wisdom and wit – they often come up against the structural challenges of living in an ageist, expensive society. For many women, they feel alone in their struggle which is why Elizabeth’s “Resilience Circles” idea caught on as a means of women collectively sharing their challenges and helping each other with solutions.
I’ve been fortunate enough to become a friend of Elizabeth since she first came to MEA eight years ago and she’s participated and led our first two Golden Girls weekend retreats and will be co-leading our next one (which is currently scheduled as the only other one this year) May 21-24 at our Santa Fe campus. Given that MEA has acquired, renovated, and furnished two large homes near our ranch campus and our first Golden Girls renters move in next month, this is an opportunity for you to explore shared living, tiny homes, and “parallel living” (a term Elizabeth coined).
Golden Girls living solves many problems at once (and, won’t be exclusively for women in the future): housing affordability, desire for belonging to combat loneliness, proximity to MEA campus for lifelong learning opportunities, and redeploying functionally obsolescent homes (what family needs a 6-bedroom home these days) as a green method of increasing our housing stock when NIMBYism makes building new housing so difficult. You can learn more about the variety of MEA’s housing initiatives on our website under the Homes section.
-Chip