Conference on Ethnicity, Health and Aging

For Immediate Release
May 31, 2000

Contact: Alka Gupta, Helen Saffran

Ethnicity, Health and Aging Conference to Take Place At Long Island University's Brooklyn Campus on June 14

Brooklyn, NY--A wide-ranging one-day conference on "Ethnicity, Health and Aging" for professionals interested in addressing aging and health in a cultural context will take place at Long Island University's Brooklyn Campus on Wednesday, June 14, from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., in Library Learning Center Room 124. Presented by the Campus's Intercultural Institute on Aging, the event will feature opening remarks by Brooklyn Borough President Howard Golden.

The aim of the conference is to increase participants' awareness of the cultural values, health care beliefs and practices among older ethnic and immigrant groups; to examine the barriers to use and delivery of services to this population; and to share useful strategies for working with diverse people in the later stages of life.

Older people from different ethnic and racial minorities are rapidly forming a larger proportion of the elderly U.S. population, according to conference coordinator Prof. Beverly P. Lyons, who directs the Institute on Aging--part of an initiative to make Brooklyn a leading center for graduate and postgraduate study in ethnogerontology (the study of the role of culture and ethnicity in human development). "Despite this trend, service delivery agencies often interact with culturally diverse older adults from a socioeconomically empowered Western European American perspective," she says. "There are vast differences in the health status, access to and use of medical, mental health and social services of minorities compared to their white American counterparts."

Educators and practitioners from Long Island University and other educational and community organizations will lead the panels. Keynote speakers are Rabbi Robert Kaplan, director of the Commission of Intergroup Relations and Community Concerns at the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York (JCRC), and Jose Ortiz Ortiz, associate executive director of the Spanish Speaking Elderly Council-RAICES. Workshop topics include family crimes against the elderly; caring for the elderly immigrant in the Caribbean context; working with older Russian-Jewish immigrants; t'ai chi for senior health promotion; traditional Asian (Buddhist) art of aging and dying; and client-centered treatment, to name a few.

The registration fee is $100 per person if mailed before June 7 and $110 after that date. Approval of continuing education credits is pending. For more information on the conference, call Beverly Lyons at (718) 488-1136.

Long Island University's Brooklyn Campus, which has experienced a decade of rapid growth, offers more than 11,000 students 127 programs in over 50 undergraduate and a comparable number of graduate fields, including doctoral programs in clinical psychology, pharmacy and pharmaceutics. Its cultural diversity, innovative academic spirit, NCAA Division 1 Blackbirds sports teams, and landscaped campus next to downtown Brooklyn's MetroTech revival area make the Brooklyn Campus a model of urban higher education. Located at the corner of Flatbush Avenue Extension and DeKalb Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn, the Campus is accessible to all major bus and subway routes and the Long Island Rail Road.

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