γεροντολογία

[...]  Kivnick was a trained musician who believed in the power of music to foster deep and healing connections among diverse peoples from all walks of life and to advance social justice. In 1984, Kivnick and her husband Gary Gardner travelled to South Africa to learn about the traditional singing of the Black community. Kivnick stayed up all night to judge traditional Zulu choral singing long before Ladysmith Black Mombazo was made famous by Paul Simon. She and Gardner produced two albums from the innovative recordings they made and the resulting “Mbube! Zulu Men’s Singing Competition” was nominated for a 1987 Grammy Award. Mbube means “lion” in Zulu and the genre refers to a male vocal music ensemble that is traditionally performed a cappella. Kivnick provided program notes and ethnological notes, texts, and translations of the Zulu passages. Her book, Where is the Way: Song and Struggle in South Africa (Penguin Books, 1990), documented the role of singing in Black life under apartheid.

For 18 years (1991–2008), Kivnick founded and directed CitySongs: Healthy Youth and Community Development through Music, a pop music choral program for at-risk inner-city youth. The CitySongs program was a collaborative university and community program, building on principles of vital involvement, strength-based social work practice, community and prevention psychology, and music education. Kivnick chose music for CitySongs focusing on love, equity, and justice, using the words of the people she interviewed to celebrate diversity. A University of Minnesota colleague remembers the program as the embodiment of a community—“the voices raised together, singing about life and convictions for the future.” Her efforts helped bridge racial and ethnic relations in the Twin Cities through the transformative impact of music long before the “Black Lives Matter” movement by connecting the kids with support and educational opportunities that changed their lives.

In 2014, Kivnick became a founding Advisory Board member of the Giving Voice Chorus, a unique Minneapolis community choir for people with dementia, care partners, and community volunteers that has inspired a social movement with over 60 choirs nationally and internationally. Once the choir was established, her role shifted to doing participant observation for qualitative evaluation of the program’s process, products, and behaviors of participants.

In 2011, Kivnick was invited to serve as Associate Editor for Humanities and Arts for The Gerontologist. She was ideal for this role given her experience as a researcher in the arts, her knowledge of key scholars in this area, and her desire to use her creativity to expand one of the leading journals on aging, The Gerontologist, in a new direction. The new section promoted scholarship on aging, humanities, and the arts as an important thread in the fabric of the study of aging (Kivnick & Pruchno, 2011). As part of her tenure in the Associate Editor role, Kivnick established On Film and Digital Media, a segment of the journal devoted to reviewing new films and other digital media. Working with Jim Vanden Bosch, Kivnick initiated “Coming to a Theater Near You,” which reviews the ways public audiences respond to popular films about aging. With Rick Scheidt, Kivnick launched “Tis a Far Better Thing,” focused on professional, educational, and training use of film and video, bringing these advances to academic circles, researchers, and advocates (Scheidt et al., 2012). These aspects of The Gerontologist are much appreciated by its readers.

After stepping down from her role as Associate Editor for Humanities and Arts in 2018, Kivnick continued to serve as Associate Editor for On Film and Digital Media (2019–2020). She worked tirelessly to ensure inclusiveness of humanistic perspectives to broaden our focus beyond prediction and explanation to concerns with human experience, meaning, and struggles. Her leadership was critical in promoting high-quality scholarship on aging, humanities, and the arts within The Gerontological Society of America.[...]

The Legacy of Helen Q. Kivnick - Debra J Sheets, Michael A Smyer, & Linda D Davis

in The Gerontologist, Volume 61, Issue 3, April 2021, Pages 297–300