GREENFIELD — Francesca Passiglia, teen librarian at Greenfield Public Library, and Judy Raper, associate dean for community engagement at Greenfield Community College, put their heads together last year in an effort to combine their skills and passions while uniting people across generations.

And so, Bookends, an intergenerational book club that meets four times a year, was born.

Together, the pair decided that a book club would be the best way to foster community relationships between two groups whose media preferences don’t often combine: teens and older adults.

“I feel like, because young people have grown up in such a technologically driven world where their communication is often via text or online, that face-to-face interactions are essential. What we know about young people is that they crave those, too. And so, offering opportunities for them to come face-to-face with older adults who have lived very different lives results in very diverse interpretations of reading,” Raper explained. “We’re not all that different, but the way we’ve come up in the world is so different.”

Passiglia admits that it’s harder to get local teens involved with the program compared to adults because they have assigned reading in school and are generally busy with schedules that they aren’t necessarily in control of.

To counteract this, Passiglia has managed to coordinate with local schools to include the book club meetings as extra credit assignments, which has shown to have a positive impact on teen attendance.

Bookends has seen a steady number of participants since the first meeting back in 2023, which attracted roughly 40 people from multiple generations for a discussion on “Crying in H Mart” by Michelle Zauner.

While they used a list of prepared questions to inspire discussion, everyone got to taste Korean food prepared by Manna House in Greenfield, aligning with the cultural themes expressed in the book itself.

“We broke into four discussion groups and we had teenagers leading two of the groups. They were willing to do it and stepped right up,” Passiglia said, observing that the youngest participants were sophomores in high school, with the oldest being people in their 90s.

Raper has been in charge of a wide array of community engagement projects over the years, with a lot of her work having been inspired by a Surgeon General Advisory calling attention to the public health crisis of loneliness.

Through her experience, Raper has succeeded in creating other intergenerational programs, with Bookends feeling like a natural segue.

Not only does Bookends provide food highlighting the cultures that the participants read about in their books, but they also occasionally invite authors to the events.

For example, Jarrett J. Krosoczka, author of the graphic memoir “Hey, Kiddo: How I Lost My Mother, Found My Father and Dealt with Family Addiction,” visited the library in April.

“We make an effort to read books that different generations will react to in different ways,” Passiglia said, thinking back to a discussion of “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption,” a nonfiction book by Bryan Stevenson about his time being a public defender. “I would say we do have some meeting guidelines, but we want people to know that they should feel comfortable saying what they feel and knowing they’re in a room with their peers. If they’re looking to try something new and looking to try a book club, I think this is a really nice one just because of the broad age range of backgrounds and interests.”

Raper came up with the name “Bookends” as a metaphor representing the opposite ends of the age spectrum that are represented in the club, as well as the physical role that bookends play in holding things together.

So far, the club has read six books: “Crying in H Mart” by Michelle Zauner, “There There” by Tommy Orange, “The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig, “Hey, Kiddo: How I Lost My Mother, Found My Father and Dealt with Family Addiction” by Jarrett J. Krosoczka, “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption” by Bryan Stevenson and, most recently, “Cemetery Boys” by Aiden Thomas.

Their next book is undecided, but those who are interested in joining the book club will be able to find copies of any future book at the Greenfield Public Library, with large print and audiobook options also available. RSVPs are recommended for every meeting.