Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

On Ageism Awareness Day, consider the impact of war on older people.

Elderly woman on a train

A woman evacuating from Pokrovsk, Ukraine, in August looks out from a train car to say goodbye.

Oleksandr Magula/Suspilne Ukraine/JSC "UA:PBC"/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images

Kilaberia is an assistant professor at New York University’s Silver School of Social Work and a public voices fellow with The OpEd Project.

We know the toll that war has on youth, but older adults are suffering displacement, too.

We have talked about age-friendly cities, age-friendly health care systems, age-friendly universities, age-friendly workplaces  dementia-friendly communities. We are not talking about age-friendly or dementia-friendly humanitarian responses.

Tomorrow is Ageism Awareness Day and it offers us the opportunity to draw attention to the impact of ageism, particularly in the many war zones around the world.


The United Nations and its partners set up play centers for children transitioning from place to place while fleeing Ukraine, for respite and a little joy. Volunteers left baby carriages, prams and strollers for fleeing Ukrainian mothers at the border. But I did not come across news about a respite center for older people fleeing. Or volunteers leaving walkers, canes and wheelchairs for older refugees at the border — at least not as ubiquitously as for youth.

Before Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, there were Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. And other wars before that. In all of them, older people were displaced.

Larissa Andreeva, 76, fled Ukraine with her family but then got separated, ending up in a village in Moldova. From there, she was forced to move to a transitional refugee shelter in the capital. Alone and isolated, she did not always share a language with other refugees who came and went. After seeking permission from the shelter director, Andreeva cordoned off her bed with fabric dividers for some “privacy” as weeks turned into months and months into one and a half years during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Dementia did not make things easier: One day, Andreeva walked out of the refugee shelter, got lost and was not able to say who she was or where she lived when asked. She was safely brought back and did not dare venture out again. Then the refugee shelter closed. She was moved to what seemed like a group home. Younger residents there shunned her because she was old and confused.

In 2024, a family friend helped her relocate to Georgia (the country) where her own family, temporarily living in the Czech Republic, was able to place her in a nursing home. Andreeva had already been an internally displaced person in Georgia three decades prior, suffering bodily harm and lifelong health consequences.

Risks from displacement can be cumulative. Older people in the United States have shared that they feel invisible in stores, restaurants, theaters and elsewhere in peacetime. Public health professionals may recall the decision-making around catastrophe medicine in Italy during the pandemic that prioritizes saving younger people over older people based on limited resources. Ageism is potent in its power to obscure the intersectionality of old age and refugeehood in wartime.

Forced displacement increases risk of abuse and neglect, especially of older women, persons with disabilities and older LGBTI persons, according to the UN Refugee Agency.

A cab driver taking Andreeva to the refugee shelter overcharged her manyfold, and what she had in her purse was all that she had in the world. She worked as a yard hand in the Moldovan village where she was first sheltered to earn her keep. Nobody may have made physical labor an explicit condition of her stay, but nobody told her she did not need to work.

I am not old, but I lived in a retirement community as a young person, and learned about older people directly from them. I am safe now, but I was displaced in an armed conflict in Georgia and suffered the loss of family and friends who were murdered. I not only grew up with displaced older people, I’ve worked with older refugees in a refugee resettlement program. I have focused on age-friendly health systems and elder mistreatment in my work.

Somehow, the neglect of older refugees seems flagrantly age-unfriendly, and translates to elder abuse, except there is no clear agent perpetrating the abuse. It’s the war. It’s the politicians and their decision-making. It’s the separation from the family. It’s the refugee shelter that closed.

Older refugees with dementia and other health issues are no less vulnerable than children. As women’s rights advocate and social worker Ollie Randall noted six decades ago, “old persons in need of help are not apt to be naturally appealing, as is a helpless child … In the field of social action, we have tended to place our hopes—and our dollars—on youth.”

People 65 or older are expected to rise to 17 percent of the world population by 2050. Given internal and cross-border displacements in past, ongoing and likely future regional wars, older refugees should be everyone’s concern.

Read More

A Promise in the Making: Thirty-Five Years of the ADA

Americans with Disabilities Act ADA and glasses.

Getty Images

A Promise in the Making: Thirty-Five Years of the ADA

One July morning in 1990, a crowd gathered on the White House lawn, some in wheelchairs, others holding signs, many with tears in their eyes. President George H.W. Bush lifted his pen and signed his name to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)—the most sweeping civil rights law for people with disabilities in the nation's history. It was a moment three decades in the making: a rare convergence of activism, outrage, and legislative will. The ADA's promise was simple—no longer would disability mean exclusion from public life—but its implications were anything but.

Thirty-five years later, the ADA remains a landmark, a legal bulwark against discrimination, and a symbol of hard-won visibility for a community that has been too often relegated to the margins. Yet, like every civil rights law, the ADA's story is more complex than a single signature or a morning in Washington. Its passage and its legacy have always been about more than ramps and regulations.

Keep ReadingShow less
Illinois Camp Gives Underrepresented Kids an Opportunity To Explore New Pathways

Kuumba Family Festival at Evanston Township High School

Illinois Camp Gives Underrepresented Kids an Opportunity To Explore New Pathways

Summer camps in Evanston, Illinois — a quiet suburb just north of Chicago — usually consist of an array of different sports, educational programs, and even learning how to sail. But one thing is obviously apparent throughout the city’s camps: they’re almost all white.

Despite Black or African American families making up nearly 16% of Evanston’s population, Black kids are massively underrepresented throughout the city's summer camps.

Keep ReadingShow less
Students in a classroom.​

Today, Hispanic-Serving Institutions enroll 64 percent of all Latino college students.

Getty Images, andresr

Tennessee’s Attack on Federal Support for Hispanic-Serving Colleges Hurts Us All

The Tennessee Attorney General has partnered with a conservative legal nonprofit to sue the U.S. Department of Education over programming that supports Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), colleges, and universities where at least 25% of the undergraduate full-time equivalent student enrollment is Hispanic. On its face, this action claims to oppose “discriminatory” federal funding. In reality, it is part of a broader and deeply troubling trend: a coordinated effort to dismantle educational opportunity for communities of color under the guise of anti-DEI rhetoric.

As a scholar of educational policy and leadership in higher education, I believe we must confront policies that narrow access and undermine equity in education for those who have been historically underserved. What is happening in Tennessee is not just a misguided action—it’s a self-inflicted wound that will harm the state's economic future and deepen historical inequality.

Keep ReadingShow less
Inclusion Is Not a Slogan. It’s the Ground We Walk On.

A miniature globe between a row of blue human figures

Getty Images//Stock Photo

Inclusion Is Not a Slogan. It’s the Ground We Walk On.

After political pressure and a federal investigation, Harvard University recently renamed and restructured its Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging. MIT announced the closure of its DEI office, stating that it would no longer support centralized diversity initiatives. Meanwhile, Purdue University shut down its Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging and removed cultural center programs that once served as safe spaces for marginalized students. I am aware of the costs of not engaging with ideas surrounding diversity and difference, and I have witnessed the consequences of the current administration's actions— and the pace at which universities are responding. It’s nowhere good.

I was forced to move to the United States from Russia, a country where the words inclusion, diversity, and equality are either misunderstood, mocked, or treated as dangerous ideology. In this country, a woman over fifty is considered “unfit” for the job market. Disability is not viewed as a condition that warrants accommodation, but rather as a reason to deny employment. LGBTQ+ individuals are treated not as equal citizens but as people who, ideally, shouldn’t exist, where the image of a rainbow on a toy or an ice cream wrapper can result in legal prosecution.

Keep ReadingShow less