The Crawford Senior Center’s very own Reesa Boyce was recognized by the Macon County Board of Commissioners at its March 11 meeting. Boyce, who teaches a collection of fitness and arts classes, including standing and seated tai chi and qigong, was celebrated as the county’s oldest employee at 91 with 11 years of service.
Boyce started working for the center after retiring from her role as the director of an addiction and substance abuse center, where she helped to design a 30-day treatment program. Before that, Boyce said she had held a collection of jobs in public education. The constant through her experience was teaching the arts and witnessing their power to heal.
When Boyce came to the Crawford Senior Center, she was initially interested in teaching exercise programs based on her experience with tai chi.
“Eleven years ago they had a sprinkling of classes, and the director at the time said ‘Why don’t you create a program?’” Boyce said, adding that she has developed programs for standing and seated tai chi and has more recently added qigong to the mix, saying that the pair of exercises have different approaches to strength, energy and flexibility.
Boyce has also incorporated a collection of arts classes into the center’s circulation. These range from sewing, crafts, scrapbooking and storytelling. Through storytelling classes, Boyce’s students have written and published two books about life in the Appalachians, titled “Life Stories.”
These classes are a part of the center’s ability to provide a holistic approach to treatment, problem solving, skill building and community development for older Maconians, overlapping their needs to help them live a quality life.
“Because we look as elders,” Boyce said, “we think of people in totality, their mental health, their physical health, their emotional health, their finances.”
In addition to her classes, Boyce also takes responsibility for writing “Motivational Mondays,” a blog that gets posted to the Crawford Center’s Facebook page each Monday. These can be both serious and frivolous, Boyce said, being inspired by a combination of local events or memories or news that stands out to her, reflecting on the reality of aging and deep connections to the community.
Her office, full of the projects and photos of her students, has served as the background for many conversations with center patrons. The corner of Boyce’s office houses a bag with a collection of refurbished teddy bears from Hickory Knoll Methodist Church, which she often gives to her guests for these discussions, which have ranged from light, friendly banter about the weather and the state of classes to conversations about grief.
Boyce said students have used her office to talk about the hardest parts of getting older: losing spouses or children, facing the brutal news of unexpected diagnoses, having to put pets down and having to pack up and move out of long-time homes.
“Aging is not for sissies,” Boyce said.
Though conversations about a potential new senior center are still in their early stages, Boyce said if a new center were to be found or built, she would like to see space for improvisational drama classes. Boyce said she thinks this addition would flesh out the arts programs and add to the kinds of skills or hobbies that seniors are able to practice, further improving their quality of life.
“I think it’s simple to be a lifetime learner,” Boyce said. “When people have been working all their lives, they have never had an opportunity to make jewelry, art, woodworking, and then they realize that now they have an opportunity to explore … it’s so much more than lunch and bingo.”
Senior Services Administrative Officer Jennifer Hollifield shared that Boyce’s tai chi class is one of the center’s more popular classes and is offered every day of the week either in person or through Zoom.
Hollifield shared another new, popular activity called chair volleyball that the center has offered since 2023 and has been enough of a hit that neighboring counties’ centers offer it as well. The center is currently planning to offer a new program called DrumFIT, that combines walking and drumming to promote an active lifestyle.
“We listen to our participants for suggestions on activities, classes, support groups, and other ways we can assist to meet their needs,” Hollifield said. “We partner with multiple local agencies, such as FYZICAL Therapy and Balance Center and the Southwestern Area Agency on Aging, in an effort to meet the variety of program requests.”
Hollifield encouraged those interested in any of the programs mentioned to reach out to the senior center for more information or to get involved.