The Bainbridge Island Senior Community Center is 20 years old this year, and this birthday season is one of growth and change.

Barbara McGilvray stepped down as director on Oct. 31, relinquishing the post to Jane Allan, who has worked at the center for five years, the last 18 months as co-director.

“One thing people always say is that the Senior Center is a very welcoming place,” McGilvray said, “and if I had any part in continuing that, I would feel like I had spent a worthwhile three-and-a-half years.”

McGilvray turns over an island institution that has tripled in size under her leadership, adding 636 new members to crest the 900 mark.

Originally a Bainbridge Island Park District program housed at the Grange, the Senior Center gained nonprofit status in 1983.

Housed in city buildings and supported by park district funds, thrift shop sales and charitable contributions, the Senior Center is the hub for a wide range of cultural, health-enhancing and social programs for seniors 55 and over.

The current park district bulletin lists such diverse offering as fly fishing and trips to the opera.

“Maybe the most important thing has to do with people making those connections to each other,” McGilvray said.

New programs, such the new softball team and a recent kayaking expedition, are driven by the wishes of the seniors – and most often instigated and run by them.

Activist seniors voice concerns to the city; members reach out to isolated seniors; and all share information and learn to cope with aging.

It’s a grassroots approach that ensures that programs truly reflect the interests of those there, according to Allan and McGilvray.

“That’s how the Senior Center began,” McGilvray said, “and preserving it may be one of the best things we’ve done.”

But some change may be driven by island demographics; the average age of Bainbridge residents is climbing.

Trying to find more space is a priority, says Allan, who brings administrative skills honed as a land-use attorney in Maryland and as a senior planner for the newly incorporated City of Bainbridge Island, where she helped draft the Comprehensive Plan.

The city-owned building on Bjune that houses the center was expanded in 1985-86, and in 1994 the city created the Commons and a health center by connecting the original building with a house next door. Plans for adding a second floor, however, were shelved for lack of funding.

“We need a social space just for people to come and hang out,” Allan said. “We want to be forward enough to plan space for the future.”

Allan plans to preserve the Senior Center’s open and inclusive atmosphere – a spirit McGilvray believes may be due to the leveling influence of age.

“One becomes more inclined to accept people for who they are, regardless of academic and work background,” she said. “You also find people doing things out of the goodness of their heart.”

Her appreciation of elders has also been deepened, she says, by the experience of caring for her own aging parents.

“The fact that we will all suffer some losses – and how we deal with those – gives us a common bond with everyone else,” she said.

McGilvray’s attraction to working with older people stems from her admiration for her grandmother, Minnie Bell Darmer, who homesteaded in Colorado as a single mother with two small children.

When McGilvray knew her as an older woman, Darmer was living in a small Iowa town.

Darmer made exquisite quilts, McGilvray recalls, and greeted neighbors from a rocking chair on her front porch.

“It was the epitome of small-town life,” she said. “Everyone knew everyone. There wasn’t a senior program in her town. But there didn’t need to be.”

After earning an undergraduate degree at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and a master’s degree in education from Salem State University in Salem, Mass., McGilvray attended the University of Washington’s Institute on Aging.

While she doesn’t claim to be “a repository of wisdom quite yet,” she has learned from other seniors.

“All the stuff one pays lip service to all one’s life about living in the moment – the seniors really do ‘seize the day,’” she said.