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Opportunities for intergenerational contact are shrinking as traditional third places decline, a trend reinforced by demographic change, increased mobility, and urban living. Co-locating schools and retirement housing offers a way to rebuild mixed-age community life. This study examines GrandSchools, a conceptual model that reconfigures auxiliary school facilities and retirement housing into intergenerational shared sites, to assess its acceptability, viability, and implementation. Semi-structured interviews with organisational leaders in education (n = 12) and retirement housing (n = 4) were analysed through an ecological lens of affordances, interdependencies, and constraints. Leaders regarded the model as acceptable in principle, because shared sites could enable socially meaningful contact that would support learning and social wellbeing for both students and older adults, while extending existing community-facing roles, provided it aligned with organisational identity and mission. Viability was seen as attainable when activities were organised as reciprocal, interest-based learning and when underused facilities could be shared or repurposed through negotiated access. Implementation was the most constrained aspect, as child-safety, privacy, and risk requirements limited the depth of spatial and programmatic integration. These findings indicate that GrandSchools can advance age-friendly communities when policy and planning treat intergenerational shared sites as core community infrastructure and support cross-sector coordination.
Miller et al. (Fri,) studied this question.