Student Onno Selbach helps out a couple of nursing home residents at Humanitas in the Netherlands (Picture: Humanitas)

University students in the Netherlands can save a few Euros on their expensive rent by receiving free room and board in a nursing home – if they hang out with the pensioners they’ll be living with.

They may not be sharing Jagerbombs with the residents of Humanitas retirement home in the town of Deventer, but the enterprising initiative means the youngsters are required to spend at least 30 hours per month acting as ‘good neighbours’.

In return for providing stimulating company to the senior citizens, the students get to live rent-free.

Gea Sijpkes, who manages the home, explained that the initiative was created two years ago, after a student complained about the poor conditions of nearby university housing.




Now, six students from the nearby universities of Saxion and Windesheim share their accommodation with 160 pensioners, and are allowed to come and go as they please, providing that they’re not a nuisance to the elderly.

Students are required to help out the pensioners while staying at the home (Picture: AFP)

Speaking to PBS about the initiative, Sijpkes said: ‘We want to be the best and warmest nursing home in Deventer.

‘So that’s why we started a project of housing students and we ask them just to be a good neighbour.

‘Young people in the house are giving them a new spirit. It’s a lot of things they offer each other, and little things of everyday life.

‘They can teach you a lot and you know them by person and not by a group of elderly people.

The students and pensioners are known for sharing cross-generational stories (Photo: AFP / Nicolas Delaunay)

Sijpkes also explained that the elderly residents aren’t too fussed about the party-loving antics of the students, either.

‘They don’t disturb each other and the stories of the young students are so interesting for the elderly. They never judge about it whether someone stays to sleep, or having a party’, he said.

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Jurrien Mentink, who is one of the students living in the home, explained that both generations were able to share their contrasting outlooks on life with each other.

He said: ‘I bring the outside in, so my world becomes their world, so things I learn in college, I try to tell that story to my neighbour they can keep up a little bit.

‘[People] say ‘the old’, which is a definition of a group, which isn’t the case because I think if you go in a person’s room and you’re being interested in their stories, they can teach you a lot and you know them by person and not by a group of elderly people.’