Description
🏆 2023 BIBA® Non-Fiction: Grandparenting/Family Relationships Winner!
A tactical, caring guide for grandparents on ways to connect with their families.
When grandchildren are young, a sweet treat or new toy is enough to inspire their unconditional adoration. And then your grandchildren grow up. Suddenly they are teenagers and it’s not so easy.
Where Two Worlds Meet starts with the teenage years, recognizing that your grandchildren are becoming independent beings. It’s an action-focused guide to stay connected and even deepen your relationship with your grandchildren as you both age.
Grandparents can have a transformative effect on their family when they unleash their creativity, share their skills, and give voice to the things they are passionate about. Creativity is about bringing your whole self, including your vulnerability, to the relationship with your grandchildren as you enter each other’s world.
JERRY WITKOVSKY (MSW, University of Illinois) is a beloved mentor to thousands of individuals and generations of families, thanks to forty-seven years of professional leadership, eighteen of them as General Director of the Jewish Community Centers of Chicago. In 1995 he was named one of the city’s “Most Effective Non-Profit CEOs” by Crain’s Chicago Business Magazine. Since his 1997 retirement, Jerry has focused his considerable energies on grandparenting facilitation—helping multigenerational families work (and play) together to create a rich family life. He has partnered with JCC and YMCA to create a writing prompt program serving over four hundred grandparents on three continents as well as a virtual improv program with UK’s Nursery Theatre. He currently spearheads a growing number of school-based programs designed to strengthen connections between grandparents and their teenagers.
DEANNA SHOSS (MA, DePaul University) is a marketer, writer, and interculturalist based in Chicago. As Founder and CEO of Intercultural Talk, Inc., Deanna helps non-digital natives promote their businesses or life projects with digital, intercultural, and real-life marketing. She takes an intergenerational approach that combines online communication platforms such as websites/blogs, social media, and video with tried and true practices such as partnership building, email marketing, and in-person events. Previously, Deanna enjoyed eleven years in City Government (she personally got the dinosaur at O’Hare International Airport through security), being past President of the League of Chicago Theatres, leading Public Relations for McDonald’s Owner/Operators of Eastern New England and directing marketing for Jewish Child & Family Services and JVS Chicago. Deanna writes for the National Diversity Council and is the Tech Columnist for Grand Magazine. She speaks Portuguese, is a certified Body Pump instructor, and is host of the weekly live broadcast, Intercultural Spark.
