TimeSlips: Unlocking Creativity for People with Dementia

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Creative expression has emerged as a powerful tool in the care and support of people with dementia. Engaging in creative activities such as drawing, painting, music, dance or storytelling can significantly enhance the quality of life for people experiencing dementia and their caregivers alike. TimeSlips is a nonprofit organization dedicated to redefining dementia care through creativity. Their approach inspires caregivers to move beyond memory loss and into a world of imagination, where every person can express, connect and thrive.

Transforming Dementia Care

Founded in 1998, TimeSlips offers caregivers around the world adaptable tools and training that support engagement, relationship-building, creative expression and inclusive programming. Their evidence-based approach brings joy to elders and their care partners by infusing creativity and meaning-making into care relationships and systems. Caregivers, family members, and people with dementia often grow frustrated trying to rely on memory to create moments of engagement. But through imagination and creativity, people with dementia are able to unlock stories, emotions and feelings that have been repressed by cognitive decline.

“Standard memory care approaches contain a lot of structure, which can sometimes create barriers to emotional connection,” said Anne Basting, Founder & Board President, TimeSlips. “Pivoting to creativity and imagination requires a mind shift and a desire to create meaningfulness. When caregivers and families are able to tap into this approach, it fulfills them and the person they are caring for.”

Through TimeSlips programming, people with dementia have demonstrated increased positive emotional expression, reduced depression, increased communication skills, greater alertness, increased engagement and reduced behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia.

The Molly Blank Fund awarded a $20,000 grant to TimeSlips to support their efforts to continue building the TimeSlips training program for caregivers, including offering a free, condensed online training program for friends and family. In the next 5 years, TimeSlips aims to create 10 million moments of joy by training 25,000 caregivers as Facilitators and 1,000 as Trainers. This grant to TimeSlips honors Molly Blank’s legacy as a woman who lived her life to the fullest – never retiring from learning or appreciating creativity.

Creativity plays a crucial role in emotional well-being for people with dementia and can create significant moments of human connection and understanding between them and their caregivers and families. TimeSlips ultimate goal is for every touchpoint of care – from home care, senior centers, meal delivery and residential care – to be an opportunity for meaning-making. This is possible by encouraging caregivers to tap into their innate sense of creativity and invite others into creative expression.