Wisdom to Wisdom Club founder Ryan Chase, a 2026 graduate, remembers fielding technical questions from his grandmother about how to FaceTime during the COVID-19 lockdown. For many senior family members, this was the only mode of contact they could use to actually see their relatives.
Current club president Alex Jacob, whose grandparents live in India, continues to help them out when he visits so that they can successfully navigate the technological tools they need to stay in touch.
Based on the passion of co-founders Chase and Kalena Imura to help isolated relatives with technical skills during the pandemic, the club aims to bring technical literacy to all in Wayland and surrounding communities.
“We provide one-on-one tech help or group seminars,” said Jacob. “Residents bring their devices and we go through step by step issues ranging from fluency with technology to how to use facetime, and even questions like ‘why does my email not work?’ We get a lot of different questions and we try to solve them to the best of our ability.”
Wisdom to Wisdom works in a similar way as WHS’s “genius bar,” a resource that supports students with their devices and their technical questions. But students participating in the Wisdom to Wisdom club offer help to people outside of the school walls and provide visits to retirement homes to help residents with an array of technical issues. The club offers a quid pro quo experience for its recipients and the five to six members during each visit.
Last year, members of the club traveled to Lexington and assisted residents in the Waterstone Facility as well as the Carmel Terrace in Framingham. This month, Jacob visited Laura Gilman at the Wayland COA and helped her with Google Docs and emails. He said working to assist others is a very rewarding experience and he remembers one particular visit that was very beneficial to him.
“Last month during a visit to Carmel Terrace, I was helping a resident with a newly purchased iPad,” Jacob explained. “I was trying to help her clear out spam. She shared stories with me about her life and her husband. He was an engineer who had worked for an aerospace company. She told me that he learned a lot of information about engineering through his many work projects but that he also, more importantly, learned the importance of balancing life with work. As someone who wants to pursue a career in engineering in the future, her stories taught me an invaluable life lesson and she gave me great advice.”
Looking for new members
Jacob hopes to recruit new members from all grades this year so that the club will continue to run after he graduates in June. Members can expect an average of one visit per month. While visits have primarily taken place in Framingham and Lexington, this year the club will reach out to other retirement communities in Wayland. Starting on Sept. 28, Wisdom to Wisdom will host monthly tech help sessions at the Council on Aging during the last Monday of each month from 4:30-5:30 p.m.
“My favorite thing about doing this is building and fostering this relationship between the elderly and us, because it’s very important that we do this as a tradeoff,” Jacob added. “As our club name suggests, they teach us about their life experience and what they’ve gone through, while we help them to better understand aspects of technology that they need help with or want to learn about further.”
For more information about the club, email w4w.techhelp@gmail.com.
