Our innovative design will be available to access via app, website, or phone call. It will be a food delivery service similar to that of DoorDash, however, our service will be different in that it will cater to the elderly who are lonely and or unable to go out and get food. A delivery person will pick up the food, bring it to their location, and sit down with them to chat while they eat. The sitting down and eating will be the primary feature of this service. This service will employ undergraduate students in psychology programs at partner colleges and universities across the country. This will provide our employees with the opportunity to develop skills relevant to their career while making a positive impact in their community, as well as ensure that our customers will be safe and respected by their delivery person. This service can go into nursing homes, retirement homes, or individual homes. If an elderly person wants to eat and chat with someone then they will be able to. No longer will they feel alone, abandoned, and disconnected from the community they are a part of.

This concept represents the Social Reasoning category. This app would help improve interpersonal relationship skills of the elderly population, of which it is common for these individuals to experience increased feelings of loneliness and or isolation for many various reasons. These reasons may be the inability for frequent visits from family members, strained relationships with family members, loss of connections due to their friends passing away from old age or illness, and more. The app will improve our sense of belonging and community connections. These two groups would be able to combine and start to feel more connected and learn to understand each other and each other’s perspectives, which is often an issue today as many elderly people feel marginalized in our society. Despite a quickly growing digital world that often makes interpersonal connections difficult and or strained, this app can encourage the community to be more connected, and especially improve the well being of the elderly population by allowing them to form real, continuous connections with people during this time in their lives.

This service will support the elderly in local communities surrounding our partner colleges and universities across the country. There are many elderly people who are lonely and or unable to go out and get food. This service will address that problem by providing food as well as a person to talk with for a short period of time. Note that the most important part of our service is the interpersonal communication, not the food. It’ll provide connection, companionship, and belonging within their local community. Unlike other services, such as Meals on Wheels where face-to-face contact and conversation is short and limited, our service will focus solely on the conversation aspect and reconnecting the elderly with the youth of today. This sense of belonging will be brought to those people who didn’t have it before. Our employees will greatly benefit from this service as well. Employees will have a job in which they choose when they work, they’ll earn a reasonable pay, and they’ll will be developing their skills in conversing with others.

This service would be funded by the government in cooperation with the University system.  The jobs will be sponsored by colleges for their students, and the customers will be reached through a governmental outreach program where volunteers will go door to door to inform and sign people up for this service. To encourage more “green” modes of transport for delivery drivers, free delivery bikes could be offered and encouraged for those who would like to deliver in the neighborhoods close to campus locations. This service would also be offered as a part of a food delivery service app that is commonly used, such as UberEats or GrubHub, as it could attract more customers this way. Psychology students at universities can find this job through the online work study opportunities website as a job listing, as well as through emails sent out by the Psychology department. It can also be offered as a volunteer opportunity of which students can earn credit or internship experience from. Elderly community offices would be encouraged to make an announcement/posting about this service so that elderly people can easily access the service.