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“After my retirement, I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life sitting on a couch, watching TV,” says Borzel. The city where she lived in central Germany did not offer many volunteering opportunities to pensioners at the time. Meanwhile, she watched on Facebook as her friend Uwe Künkenrenken detailed his visits to a kindergarten to play music and participate in theater with children. Künkenrenken’s wife, Anni, was engaging with kids from the same kindergarten by reading to them and teaching German to refugee students.
In contrast to Hildburghausen, an engaged life well into old age is the norm where the Künkenrenkens live. And it’s not by accident. The product of a decades-long project to build an aging-friendly destination, their leafy, quaint west German town of Arnsberg might be one of the most successful examples of senior-friendly urban development in the world. At its core? A city department like no other: the Fachstelle Zukunft Alter the Department of Future