In an era when universities face declining enrolment and senior living communities grapple with care models grounded in outdated notions of the life course, an innovative partnership in Arizona is challenging conventional thinking about both sectors. Mirabella at ASU, a continuing care retirement community situated on Arizona State University’s Tempe campus, is pioneering a new model of intergenerational engagement that positions residents as vital contributors to student success while simultaneously reimagining what retirement can look like in the 21st century.
GSL News sat down with Lindsey Beagley, ASU’s Senior Director, Lifelong University Engagement, to explore how proximity, purpose, and a willingness to let relationships develop organically are creating unexpected benefits for both students and residents – and why this model may represent the future of higher education.
A partnership built on strategic thinking
Mirabella at ASU is a joint venture between ASU Enterprise Partners and Pacific Retirement Services, an Oregon-based nonprofit senior living developer. As a continuing care retirement community, the vast majority of its 350 independent living residents enjoy full access to university life. Residents in higher levels of care also enjoy university learning and engagement, available through on-site programming such as weekly lectures and an Artist-in-Residence programme.
Mirabella’s location on the northwest corner of ASU’s dense urban campus is one feature that makes it unique, but the strategic thinking that put it there in the first place is even more unique.
“I often get questions, why does that make sense? Why does a retirement community belong on, frankly, a very dense urban campus where these parcels of land are precious and need to be used strategically?” explains Lindsey. “But for many reasons, it represents the strategic direction of the university, which is to expand its learning offerings to learners at different stages of life, not just those who are 18 to 25, but to post-career learners, so it establishes this new learner segment.”
Residents can audit any of ASU’s 20,000 courses, receive complimentary tickets to athletics and arts events, access all eight campus libraries, use campus shuttle transportation, and receive tech support. About 50% take classes in any given semester, whilst around 90% engage with campus life in some other way – whether through informal learning, mentorship, or volunteerism. Lindsey explains:
“You typically don’t think of retirement as a time of exploration, growth … but all 350 residents are doing something completely different, which I think is so cool. … and they are exploring in ways that are even richer than they might have been able to do at 20 years old”
The business case: beyond land lease
Whilst the land lease provides ASU with both an upfront payment and annual contractual revenue, the benefits extend far beyond the immediate transaction.
By establishing pathways for learners at different life stages, the university positions itself as forward-thinking and relevant to post-career learners. The living laboratory created by Mirabella helps ASU understand how older learners want to engage with higher education – valuable insight as demographics shift.
The emotional and developmental support residents provide to students represents another significant benefit. Through programmes like the Friendship Bench, resident volunteers offer scalable mental health support that would be impossible to provide through professional staff alone. Students gain access to mentorship, resilience lessons and life perspectives from experienced professionals – learning that happens organically rather than through expensive programmed interventions.
The partnership also generates sustained philanthropic interest. “Residents are on campus for five, 10, sometimes 15 years,” Lindsey notes. “They are developing a sense of affinity for the university. They want to champion the university’s educational mission. They want to see students succeed.”
This sustained engagement has resulted in gifts of real estate, planned giving, and generous support. “It’s sort of this secondary financial benefit that we’re seeing as a result of this model,” she explains.
Perhaps most importantly, the partnership breaks down age-related barriers and stereotypes on campus, creating a richer, more diverse learning environment. As one example of ASU’s commitment to serving learners across the lifespan, Mirabella enhances the university’s institutional identity and mission in ways that resonate with prospective students and faculty alike.
Rethinking the life-course model
These benefits emerge from a fundamental rethinking of how we understand the human lifespan. Lindsey notes that the traditional life course model – learn, work, retire – made sense when retirement lasted just a few years. But with lifespans extending dramatically, retirement can now last 30 years or more.
“We did a great job expanding our lifespan through innovations in healthcare, nutrition, and public safety, but we didn’t necessarily spend time thinking about what to do with those extra years. So much of this project has been a living laboratory to figure out, what do older learners want from universities? How do they want to learn? What do they want to learn? How do they want to engage? I don’t think anybody knows that answer, because this is a new life stage we just haven’t seen before.”
Lindsey observes that one of the most powerful insights from Mirabella has been understanding how differently older learners approach education compared to traditional students. “Sometimes they’re taking classes that will help them engage with their adult children or their grandchildren on topics that are important to them,” she explains. “Sometimes they’re taking classes that they happen to be an expert in, but they want to understand how it’s being taught.”
She shares the example of two residents – a retired Attorney General and a professor of campaign finance – who enrolled in an introduction to ethics course. “I asked, ‘You could teach that class. Why would you take it?’ But their motivation is around understanding how young people are learning and understanding these foundational concepts. It gives them a great deal of hope to know that they are learning.”
Beyond traditional mentorship
Whilst many intergenerational programmes default to traditional mentorship models, Mirabella has deliberately taken a different approach. Lindsey’s own doctoral research has revealed something significant: the relationships that form at Mirabella often resist easy categorisation.
“I’ve interviewed so many student-resident friendships, and they really struggle with defining what their friendship is,” she explains. “There’s a little bit of grandparent in there, there’s very much a friendship, there’s a little bit of mentoring maybe, but they’re uncomfortable with that word. They’re negotiating this beautiful relationship that doesn’t have a name.”
This insight has shaped how programmes are designed. Rather than formal matching systems that pair mentors with mentees that seem to be a good fit on paper, Mirabella creates opportunities for organic connections through semi-structured social mixers and collaborative volunteerism.
“We’ve all been part of those programmes where immediately you don’t really vibe with your mentor, but somebody thinks that’s an important match for you,” she notes. “What I do is create environments where older people and younger people are working together alongside one another, doing something for the community. In these environments, they get to know one another, they have a reason to be with one another, and that’s when you get these really authentic connections.”
And the approach seems to work. Lindsey notes that some friendships last just a semester, while others extend for three years or longer.
Contributions that can’t be categorised
Some of the most impactful roles that residents play don’t have formal names at all. Lindsey has documented a remarkable variety of ways in which residents make contributions: practice interviewers helping students prepare for job searches, conversation partners supporting cultural integration for international students, project coaches, and professional teaching assistants.
One particularly powerful example involves a retired physician who wanted to support pre-med students but wasn’t sure how. After conversations with the academic team, a need emerged: students had real-world questions about physician burnout, the business side of healthcare delivery, and the lived experience of medical practice that faculty couldn’t address from personal experience.
The physician gathered five other retired doctors from the community, and for the past three years, they’ve been mentoring 80 students through monthly gatherings where students set the agenda. Recent sessions have included empathy-building workshops where students can practice their bedside manner and delivering sensitive or sad news.
“He told me, ‘This is one of the most meaningful things that I’ve done in my lifetime.’ And I didn’t programme for it – that’s the important part. Because he lives here, he was able to live out this purpose-driven engagement experience that was entirely because he had the desire to do it. Imagine that happening multiplied by 350.”
The Artist-in-Residence programme
Mirabella’s award-winning Artist-in-Residence programme demonstrates how arts can serve as bridges between generations. Each year, four music students live in the community for 10 months, with two programming requirements per week: one performance and one “flex engagement.”
“What we didn’t want is for students to perform for the community and then go back to their room,” says Lindsey. “We really wanted music to be the mechanism to connect meaningfully.”
Flex engagements are interactive events where students design musical programming in response to what community members want. “And residents feel seen, and they feel bought into the programming.”
Because the students live in the building, the relationships extend beyond performances. “They live in the building, so the students work out with residents. They eat dinner with residents. They spend time in this art studio together – they’re neighbours,” she emphasises. The programme has created lasting connections – one student who became director of a major opera company even had residents fly out to attend his opening night.
The Friendship Bench: tackling loneliness and isolation
Perhaps the most scalable innovation to emerge from Mirabella is the Friendship Bench programme, which addresses student loneliness through a remarkably simple intervention: trained residents sitting on benches across campus, ready to listen.
The programme originated in Zimbabwe as a way to expand community mental health support in areas with insufficient professional resources. After the former US Surgeon General declared loneliness and isolation an epidemic particularly affecting young adults, ASU’s Chief Wellbeing Officer wanted to implement the model on campus.
“That’s a tall order at a campus like this, with tens of thousands of students” Lindsey notes. “Yet, if you think about older adults, they represent this abundant human capital resource. These are folks who have time, and they have experience and wisdom.”
In the pilot year, 66 Mirabella residents received training in active listening and referral to professional resources. They completed 150 hours in the first semester, reaching approximately 600 people, nearly 500 of whom were students. Many residents commit to at least one hour per week, though some stay for several hours as students seek them out.Wearing shirts that say, “Let’s Talk” or sitting with signs reading “I’m All Ears,” Mirabella’s volunteer listeners have created an accessible, low-stakes way for students to connect. Some bring therapy dogs, which helps break the ice.
“The fabulous insight is that such a simple programme – just sitting on the bench is enough to create the connection,” she reflects. “It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.” Lindsey notes that residents sometimes return from their Friendship Bench sessions tearful, feeling moved by the importance of what they’re doing.
The pen pal programme – low-tech, high impact
Another successful programme has created lasting connections through an unexpectedly retro approach: a pen pal programme through which ASU students are connected with a Mirabella resident who will make the first outreach to introduce themselves.
“I thought the students would never be interested in this,” Lindsey admits. “Some of them will tell you that at first, it felt like an assignment. But the programme is over, and they’re still meeting up. Clearly, it’s become a real relationship.”
The programme can be deployed with any academic unit interested in participating. It’s simple, costs nothing, and requires minimal coordination – yet it efficiently overcomes age-related stereotypes. Students who began as pen pals in 2022 or 2023 still maintain contact, even after graduation.
Reciprocal learning
In Lindsey’s view, one of the most persistent myths about intergenerational programmes is that they’re one-directional – older people sharing wisdom with younger people who have none of their own. Mirabella’s experience challenges this assumption entirely.
“Our old mental models are that older people have all the knowledge and all the wisdom, and they’re the mentors, and young people know nothing,” says Lindsey. “That’s really narrow. When residents take classes, they’ll come back and say, ‘These students are so smart. I was not like that when I was their age.'”
She shares a particularly powerful example of reciprocal learning. A resident attended a lecture on sustainability featuring promising innovations in climate action. Afterwards, she started talking to the student next to her, enthusiastic about how promising the developments seemed. The student’s response was quite different – he felt overwhelmed, gloomy, and weighed down by the enormity of the challenge.
They spent 15 minutes after class exploring why they had such different perspectives on the same lecture. “Karen, who’s 82, has seen some things in her life, and he’s learning from her that there’s hope to be had, that you can weather really challenging, seemingly impossible things,” Lindsey explains. She reflects on the significance of this exchange: “These are the essential ingredients for solving real problems together. Older people can deepen their empathy for what young people are experiencing, and young people can borrow the resilience and the hope of older people. That is a really powerful combination.”
And this wasn’t a formal programme or structured mentorship session. It was simply a conversation after class on an ordinary day.
The gift of resilience
Yet perhaps the most profound insight students gain from these exchanges isn’t knowledge at all – it’s a perspective on their own journey through life. Lindsey recalls a conversation with a student who had learned that a resident had moved from architecture to fashion design, creating a career path the student had never even heard of. The student realised that they didn’t have to have it all figured out right now, and that they can make different choices in life and change jobs and even go back to school.
“If every young person could arrive at that conclusion, that’s resilience,” Lindsey observes. “That’s something that they can only learn from an older person in their life – that whatever your plan is today, it will change. You will have to adapt. You will have to continue to learn. And older people are models of that. They’re modelling for young people that it’s okay to keep making choices and changing your life and adapting.”
“Resilience – that’s the gift.”
Lessons for the sector
For universities and senior living operators considering similar partnerships, Lindsey emphasises that it is critical to shift deeply held assumptions about both life stages and institutional boundaries. It requires viewing older adults as “abundant human capital” that has been nurtured and grown over decades, rather than as a “silver tsunami” that threatens to overwhelm social systems.
“We’ve known this demographic shift is happening for ages, but what we’ve lacked is this perspective that it is an asset. … Another challenge is that both older and younger people are considered vulnerable populations, and (others wanting to try a similar approach) never figure out how to overcome the age segregation – but I have seen with my own eyes that the good that can come vastly outweighs any concerns”.
For senior living operators, the model positions residents as contributors with valuable expertise. “For those senior living communities trying to figure out how to create a partnership with a university, I would say your community represents so much human capital that can be useful to students,” she advises. “How can you find out what the students need and map that onto the skills and interests of the community members? Then the collaboration becomes this mutually beneficial arrangement.”
She contrasts this with the traditional approach of having students visit to sing carols. “Seniors are the beneficiaries, they’re the recipients of this arrangement, they’re the vulnerable ones, the needy ones. That is unimaginative,” she says bluntly. “Universities are resource-strapped themselves. But if they could view older adults as a strategic growth strategy, as an aspect of strategic resource, then you get these partnerships that are absolutely mutually beneficial.”
Location is also critical – proximity is everything. “If our community was 30 minutes off campus, or even half a mile off campus, a 15-minute walk – that is just enough for it to prevent residents from feeling like they belong there,” she explains. “They have to have a reason to go to campus. They have to arrange transportation. They are not full members of the campus community.”
At Mirabella, residents carry student ID cards that explicitly signal belonging and provide access to all campus facilities. “Really thinking about what it will take to signal that this community is part of the university” is crucial, she emphasises.
Looking ahead
After six years of operation, interest in the Mirabella model is growing, particularly in Asia. “Asia has an extreme enrolment cliff problem,” Lindsey explains. “Their lifespans are longer, and their birth rates are lower, so there’s this tremendous under-mobilisation of their educational facilities, and they need solutions.”
The university-based retirement community model offers an attractive opportunity for universities facing demographic challenges. But Lindsey emphasises the need for adaptation rather than replication.
“I would love to see more universities adopt this model, but certainly adapt it to their institutional context,” she says. “What are their strengths? What are their campus experiences that they can open up to older learners? It’s not about inventing something new. Thinking through what your university already offers, what they already do, and how you can create pathways for older learners to engage – that will be the formula.”
The future of both sectors
Both higher education and senior living face significant challenges. Universities are grappling with demographic shifts, the impact of artificial intelligence, and questions about their fundamental purpose. Senior living communities face workforce shortages and the challenge of meeting the needs of residents who may live in their communities for decades.
For Lindsey, these parallel challenges create an opportunity for wholesale reimagination.
“Higher education and senior living, these are both industries that cannot continue the way that they’re going, the way that they’ve been operating,” she argues. “They’re both ripe for disruption. They both have to think differently in order to survive the current forces – economic, political, social, demographic.”
“Universities are already having to change. We’re having to adapt to AI, having to adapt to other things. We’re already having to redesign what the modern university looks like. Why not also redesign it for connection, for learning across the lifespan? Let’s redesign it wholesale for all the things that we want universities to be able to do.”
Most fundamentally, it requires universities to reframe partnerships with senior living organisations as strategic growth opportunities that expand their mission to serve learners across the lifespan rather than community service initiatives.
Interested in learning more?
The Age-Friendly University Global Network movement is a network of more than 130 higher education institutions from around the world that aim to shape how we live and work by increasing educational opportunities across the lifespan. The Age-Friendly University Global Network’s North American Regional Meeting and Longevity Innovations in Higher Education Summit will be held from 11-13 March 2026 at Mirabella at ASU, Tempe, Arizona.
For the first time, this event brings together scholars, higher education leaders, and other visionary partners to explore existing and emerging innovations such as university retirement communities, midlife transition programs, cogeneration programs, and other strategic initiatives that leverage the capacity of the modern higher education institution to meet the moment of our changing demographics.
Visit: https://www.afugn.org/conference for more information.
