School of Social Work Is Mourning the Passing of Professor Helen Kivnick

From Jim Reindary, School of Social Work interim director to the SSW Community:

The School of Social Work is extremely saddened to announce that Professor Helen Kivnick died yesterday afternoon, September 14.

As her husband, Gary, mentioned in Caring Bridge, she had been non-communicative for the past week and, although she had been struggling for some time with cancer, her death was due mainly to pneumonia. She was completely peaceful at the end.

Non-communicative. As everyone who knew and loved Helen, there was nothing non-communicative about her life. It was a life saturated with music, art, vitality, and wonder. And all of these characteristics drove her research on older adults and vital involvement: vital involvement as a social capital that undergirds all of us from young to old. This is so evident in the music that shaped her research, from leading choirs of kids in City Songs, to making Grammy-nominated recordings of folk performances in South Africa, to the vitality that singing-together restores within older adults with dementia.

Take a listen to the Twin Cities-based Giving Voice Chorus,  a groundbreaking set of choirs for people with Alzheimer’s disease, care partners, and community volunteers, for which Helen had served as a volunteer and researcher since 2013:

We all loved Helen and will miss her dearly. Music comes to mind when I think of her, but of course her life’s work and research was more than that. She is responsible—though some have taken it up with less notice than due—for much of the conceptual theory that is so prominent in the positive research towards older adults today. In the coming days, let’s take this opportunity to explore more of Helen and her gifts to all of us.

A Zoom funeral service for Helen will be held Thursday, Sept. 17, 2020, at noon; Zoom Shiva Thursday, 7:00 p.m. Email zoom2@hodroffepstein.com for the link. View her online obituary page.

If you want to share your memories, photos or videos of Helen with others, please send them to sswweb@umn.edu. They will be added to a memorial page that will be created on the SSW website.