Alumni Excellence Award Recipient: Marie Brodsky ’24

Statistics point to a wrenching reality: 40% of older Americans report feeling lonely, according to AARP. Research also links social isolation in older adults to increased risks of dementia, stroke and shorter life expectancy. 

Marie Brodsky ’24 witnessed these challenges firsthand during the Covid lockdown of 2021. Her maternal grandfather had moved into Brodsky’s home in Rockville, Maryland, where the native Russian speaker’s loneliness was compounded by language barriers, a new geography and the challenge of no longer driving. As the world emerged from the pandemic, Brodsky decided to make a difference for the millions of older adults in a similar circumstances.

After winning funding from the City of Fairfax to explore the concept, she created the online platform WISE Cities (since renamed WISE Connect) to connect seniors to a panoply of social options, from walking groups and art shows, to educational sessions and social meetup hosted by local cafés, museums and community spaces. Every activity includes an option to request a ride, removing one of the biggest barriers to participation. 

“People have this sense that their only choice right now is to go to the senior center,” Brodsky says. “For some people that works but, for others, there’s a negative connotation and they don’t want to go.” 

WISE Connect serves about 2,000 monthly users in the Greater D.C. Area, with plans to expand into North Carolina and Kentucky before going nationwide. The platform is currently free, with plans for optional paid memberships for users who want expanded programming and support. 

The company has received more than $300,000 in funding, including multiple awards from the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH)National Institute on Aging. Brodsky credits the UMD’s entrepreneurship ecosystem, including the Terp Startup Accelerator and Fellowship and the Do Good Institute, for giving her the skills to launch WISE Connect. 

Brodsky developed the business after an initial pitch to the Smart City Challenge, a Northern Virginia initiative to improve cities through innovation. While most submissions focused on infrastructure and hardware technology, including traffic systems and wireless networks, Brodsky’s imagination went elsewhere. Cities, she realized, didn’t need to be smarter. They needed to be wiser. 

“We keep adding layers of tech,” she says, “but we don’t design cities around the fact that people are aging.” 

At its core, WISE Connect is a hyperlocal, accessible platform that helps older adults discover what’s happening in their own neighborhoods. Rather than pointing users to national organizations, it highlights nearby programs, activities and resources that are often just down the block. 

Users come to WISE Connect for one primary reason: connection. “Overwhelmingly, people tell us they’re afraid of becoming isolated,” Brodsky says. 

Initially, Brodsky’s team built a mobile app. Testing quickly revealed a problem: downloading an app was enough to lose many potential users. The solution was to build a web-based platform that works on devices that include smartphones and library computers. 

Accessibility drives every design decision. WISE Connect is multilingual and shows activities in the user’s preferred language. Voice-based interaction (no buttons required) is coming next. 

Unfortunately, by the time WISE Connect fully launched, Brodsky’s grandfather’s health had declined significantly. While he was able to attend some early activities, he never got to experience the platform as she originally imagined. “That’s the hardest part,” she says. “I started this because of him. And I really believe that if he’d had this five years earlier, his health trajectory would be different”.