CGU’s Claremont Flourishing Center Brings the Science of Well-Being to Older Adults
A new university initiative is turning decades of positive psychology research into practical tools for aging communities — beginning in a retirement community just miles from campus.
On a Wednesday morning in early April, the common rooms of Hillcrest Retirement Community in La Verne filled with older adults, caregivers, and researchers gathered around a shared question: What does it take to truly flourish?
The Flourishing in Challenging Times Community Summit, held at Hillcrest, marked one of the first major public-facing events of the Claremont Flourishing Center — a CGU initiative launched in June 2025 with a mission to spread the science of happiness and well-being beyond the university’s walls and into communities where that knowledge can do the most good. The half-day event was free to attend and drew participants from across the region to engage in hands-on sessions, facilitated conversations, and presentations rooted in decades of CGU research.
The summit reflected a growing conviction among CGU faculty and administrators that the university’s deep expertise in positive psychology — one of the fastest-growing areas of behavioral science — carries an obligation to reach beyond academic journals and into the lives of real people navigating real challenges.
“We want to connect our community members to the people who know the science and can spread flourishing throughout the community,” said Zach Swanson, PhD student in Developmental Psychology at CGU and Director of Strategic Partnerships for the Claremont Flourishing Center. “It’s because they’ve actually done the research themselves that they’re able to speak to what it takes to build a flourishing life.”
A University Built on the Science of Happiness
CGU’s involvement in positive psychology is not recent. The university is one of only two graduate programs in the United States offering doctoral-level study in the field — a distinction tied directly to the late Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the pioneering Hungarian-American psychologist who developed the concept of “flow” and whose decades of work at CGU shaped an entire generation of researchers in the science of human flourishing.
That legacy now animates the Claremont Flourishing Center, whose academic foundation draws on the work of CFC President Stewart Donaldson, a prolific scholar of applied positive psychology, and faculty researchers Dr. Jeanne Nakamura and Dr. Saida Heshmati, both of whom participated in the April 9 summit. Swanson noted that it is precisely because these scholars have conducted the research themselves that they are well-positioned to communicate it to community audiences with authority.
“We have decades of research coming out of CGU that talks about how you build flourishing lives,” Swanson said. “We’re lucky enough to have our president, Stewart Donaldson, who has written extensively on the topic, and our faculty mentors, Dr. Nakamura and Dr. Heshmati.”
The Claremont Flourishing Center, which formally launched in June 2025, has moved quickly to establish itself not only as an academic home for positive psychology research but as a community-facing engine for translating that scholarship into accessible programming.
Meeting Older Adults Where They Are
The choice to partner with Hillcrest, a nonprofit continuing care retirement community, was both strategic and symbolic. Older adults represent a population for whom questions about flourishing, resilience, and purpose carry particular weight, especially as social isolation, health challenges, and systemic change intersect in complex ways.
Dr. Ryan Harrison, Hillcrest’s Senior Director of Engagement, Outreach, and Wellness, described the partnership as a natural fit with the community’s own wellness philosophy. Hillcrest operates according to a seven-dimensional wellness model that encompasses body, mind, and spirit, as well as environment, emotions, relationships, and pursuits—including hobbies, engagement, and volunteerism.
“When I think of flourishing, I think of that wellness wheel,” Harrison said. “How can I, as a single person, expand into each of those dimensions of wellness?”
For Harrison, the alignment between Hillcrest’s framework and the CGU-grounded science presented at the summit was more than conceptual — it was an invitation to deepen the community’s existing commitment to whole-person wellness with research-informed tools.
“Flourishing is leaning a little bit more into each of those areas so I continue to grow and become the best that I can be,” Harrison said.
The summit’s programming reflected that multidimensional view of well-being. In addition to focusing on physical health, sessions were designed to address the relational, psychological, and purposeful dimensions of aging well, offering participants not just information but practical strategies they could apply in their own lives.
Research That Reaches Communities
The Flourishing in Challenging Times Summit is part of a broader effort by CGU and the Claremont Flourishing Center to meet aging communities across the greater Los Angeles and Inland Empire region. Swanson said the center has been working with older adult groups throughout the area, with the shared goal of teaching what it means to age well and to live a life oriented toward flourishing.
That work sits squarely within CGU’s institutional emphasis on translational scholarship — research that does not stop at publication but moves into communities, informing practice, shaping policy, and improving lives. For a university whose faculty have spent decades studying the conditions that enable human beings to thrive, the summit in La Verne represented something concrete: proof that the science of flourishing can travel.
“Our organization began last June, and we’ve started to make a name around the globe trying to spread the science of happiness and flourishing to different communities,” Swanson said.
A Model for Community-Engaged Scholarship
The summit may be early in the Claremont Flourishing Center’s history, but it points toward a scalable model for how graduate research universities can serve as anchors of community well-being. By pairing scholarly expertise with accessible programming and deep community partnerships, CGU is demonstrating that the distance between a doctoral dissertation and a retirement community common room does not have to be as wide as it might seem.
For the older adults and caregivers who gathered at Hillcrest, the event offered something that no journal article can fully provide: a conversation, a handshake, a moment of recognition that the questions they live with about purpose, resilience, connection, and meaning are questions that serious researchers take seriously, too.
Swanson said the center intends to continue expanding its reach, building on partnerships like the one with Hillcrest to bring the science of flourishing to more communities across the region.
“We’re in community near Claremont and La Verne, and we’re meeting with older adult groups across the area in order to teach them a little bit about how do you age well and how do you live a life of flourishing,” he said.
The Claremont Flourishing Center’s next events and community partnerships are forthcoming, including the upcoming Western Positive Psychology Association Conference on May 29th hosted at Claremont Graduate University. You can find more information about the center and it’s programming on CGU’s Positive Psychology website.
The Flourishing in Challenging Times Community Summit was hosted in partnership with Hillcrest Retirement Community in La Verne. The event was free and open to older adults, caregivers, and members of the broader community.