The OMA mission is to build bridges across age and cognitive barriers through art, through providing meaningful social engagement between people living with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia and college student interns or volunteers. OMA’s overarching goal is to promote the well-being of people living with dementia by providing and facilitating art activities that provide positive emotion, relationship, meaningfulness and accomplishment (based on Martin Seligman’s well-being theory).
Senator Pepper’s mission was to highlight the value of our community’s aging population and see them as living treasures, which they are. In line with his vision, OMA employs a person-centered approach that capitalizes on the elder’s strengths and abilities rather than what they are no longer able to do. OMA recognizes that people living with dementia can grow and learn, use and appreciate fine art references, and be challenged in new ways.
Sen. Claude Pepper believed, as do we, that these opportunities should not be isolated to only those that can afford them but be made accessible to all of the community. Therefore, it is also our mission to expand this program to our broader community here in the Florida panhandle as well as become an OMA training facility for the state of Florida. At the Claude Pepper Center, we believe in the benefits for all involved and are committed to making this a reality across the state of Florida and beyond.