It’s the kind of thing people have been doing for years, letters back and forth between total strangers. But here at Sunnyside Community Services, the letters are tangible proof that older adults have a lot of wisdom to share.

“We have a lot of things in common,” said Ines Ruiz, an older adult at Sunnyside Community Services. “And we are usually the forgotten ones, but they do come over here and work with us and it’s really nice. It really is.”

“The way I thought about it is I was walking down a hallway in the center and then they had this thing called pet pals and I was like, ‘pet pals — pen pals,’” Faiza remembered.

What You Need To Know

  • Walking down the hallway of where she volunteers, Afnan Faiza thought up the idea of creating Pen Pals between her high school peers and the older adults at Sunnyside Community Services

  • The high schoolers write under code names. In five weeks the group will all come together and meet for the first time. Here the older adults will guess which high schooler they think is their pen pal

  • Faiza hopes the program will only expand as both older adults and high schoolers continue to find joy in the letters they're writing

Pairing older adults with students from her high school, Afnan Faiza created Pen Pals. Now she facilitates the connections, delivering letters between the pairs and creating weekly writing prompts for participants.

“I guess I’m the mail person,” Faiza joked. “I’m bringing the letters here and then back to school.”

To keep things interesting, there’s a twist in the letter writing relationships. The high school seniors write under pen names. In five weeks, they’ll gather together and the older adults will have to guess who their correspondent was from the group of high schoolers.

“This one older adult, her name is Donna, she came up to me the other day, and she was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I can’t wait to meet sparkles. I’m so excited to meet her!’ and honestly, that just brought the biggest smile to my face,” Faiza said.

Thanks to the diversity of Sunnyside, language is no barrier. Faiza is convinced she can always find a pairing and establish a genuine interchange of ideas and wisdom.

“We do have a lot of information that we can share but they also have a lot of information that they can teach us, so we really do an interchange of ideas,” Ruiz said.

“I think they’ll also be able to learn a lot from each other as well from what they tell each other in the letters,” Faiza said.

For delivering connections in Queens, Afnan Faiza is our New Yorker of the Week.