Pandemic Pivot brings Gen Zs and Baby Boomers together in unique way

Students in HTM’s Customer Relations Management class became pen pals for residents at St. Mary Healthcare Center, writing them regularly after the pandemic shuttered in-class instruction and restricted visitors at the Lafayette nursing home.

When Purdue’s Customer Relations Management class was forced to go online for the second half of its spring semester because of the coronavirus pandemic, limited-term lecturer Keith Molter had to improvise to meet the course’s goals.

A key requirement for Molter’s students is to complete 10 hours of community service for one of the many nonprofit organizations in Greater Lafayette. But how could that be accomplished in the midst of a quarantine and a shuttered university campus?

"This bridged two completely different generations — the Gen Zs and the Baby Boomers. It worked out really well." — Keith Molter, limited-term lecturer, HTM’s Division of Consumer Science

Molter got the idea to have the students handwrite letters to residents at St. Mary Healthcare Center, a Lafayette nursing home whose daily routines also had been turned upside-down by the global pandemic.

It was the perfect solution at a not-so-perfect time — making the best out of an historically tough situation — that changed the lives of Molter’s students and the nearly 100 residents and the staff and St. Mary.

“This bridged two completely different generations — the Gen Zs and the Baby Boomers,” says Molter, a lecturer in HTM’s Division of Consumer Science. “It worked out really well.”

Molter is being modest. During the course of the spring class, his consumer science students and St. Mary residents combined to write more than 250 letters. Some of the pen-pals continued corresponding into the summer, long after the virtual class ended in May.

For the fall 2020 semester, again as part of the class’ community-service component, Molter plans to continue the relationship with St. Mary by having the students connect one-to-one with a specific nursing home resident.

“We’ve already started receiving the first batch of letters, and it’s just the first week of class,” says a delighted Makenzie Miles, executive director at St. Mary.

"This bridged two completely different generations — the Gen Zs and the Baby Boomers. It worked out really well." — Keith Molter, limited-term lecturer, HTM’s Division of Consumer Science

Initially, Miles wasn’t sure how the more than 50 residents would enjoy receiving mail from people they had never met. Her concern was short-lived. There were often days during the spring semester when the students wrote so many letters that every resident at St. Mary was able to receive at least one — quite the change, since some of the elderly residents had never received any mail while there.

“The response was overwhelming. It’s lifting their spirits,” Miles says. “Our residents would come up to the front desk every day and ask if there were letters there. It really gave them something to look forward to — the letters from students they would call ‘the cute Purdue boys.’ One of the residents still has the letters and pictures hanging up in her room from a student and their family. Really, it’s the simple things we’re using to get by right now, during this pandemic.”

Residents at St. Mary were very excited about this pen-pal relationship established with the Purdue HTM class — so much so that residents would almost daily check to see if there was any new mail from the students.

In all, Molter said more than 250 letters have been sent to St. Mary — with more to come during the fall semester. “This is something that will continue. My students were very interested in it; some said it was the first letter they had ever written,” he says.

The majority of the students in Molter’s class are a part of the College of Health and Human Sciences Selling and Sales Management program, which recently was named a top program in the nation by the Sales Education Foundation.

The Purdue-St. Mary community service effort was so successful in spring 2020 that the class decided to continue the letter-writing in fall 2020.

The majority of the students in Molter’s class are a part of the College of Health and Human Sciences Selling and Sales Management program, which recently was named a top program in the nation by the Sales Education Foundation.  

As the lead teaching assistant in Molter’s class, Olivia Shaul participated by writing her own letters. The junior from Indianapolis decided to add her own flair to the project by painting miniature canvases for the residents in addition to the letters.

Olivia Shaul, lead teaching assistant for Professor Molter’s HTM’s Customer Relations Management class in spring 2020, not only wrote to the St. Mary residents but painted miniature canvases she would add to the correspondence.

“We thought the students should focus on giving back to the community, to bring smiles and a little happiness to their lives, because the nursing home residents are helping shape future generations,” said Shaul, who hopes to graduate in December 2021. “It’s the least I can do to put a smile on their face during this life-altering time. Everyone deserves to feel loved and appreciated.”