Sitting on the shore, Rodney Bryant points east, away from the boathouse and towards the deepest part of the lake in North Park, Allegheny County. That’s where he used to catch catfish and trout on his weekly trips to the park, he explains, “until I had my first heart attack, three years ago. I haven’t been here since. Not ‘til today.”

Bryant’s most recent trip to North Park, on a made-to-order sunny summer’s afternoon, wasn’t necessarily about catching fish. With Fisherman’s Tale, a Grassroots Project lead by the century-old senior-care organization Lemington Community Services (LCS), Bryant and over a dozen other African-American seniors—largely from the Lincoln-Lemington neighborhood of Pittsburgh—visited North Park to catch some rays, catch up with friends, and tell some stories. And if those stories happened to reflect on the state of their mental and physical health, LCS Executive Director Joy Starzl says, all the better.

“We’ve always had a guy’s night at the center, where the seniors come in and play cards and talk,” says Starzl. “We bring someone in to talk about an issue, but not to stand up and talk about it—they just sit around and play cards with the guys, and bring up things like grieving and depression. But the men stopped coming, so we thought, we need to expose them to this information. We did a survey, and they said, ‘we don’t wanna play cards—we want to go fishing!’”

Fisherman’s Tale brought the guy’s night outside. Along with the seniors, LCS took a few extra folks along on their trips: Doctors, psychologists, neighbors and friends who could casually chat with the fishermen and find out what’s really going on with them. Lincoln-Lemington, along with several other predominantly African-American neighborhoods in Pittsburgh from which LCS draws the majority of its clientele, is a rough place to be a senior citizen. A lack of amenities geared towards seniors, coupled with a high crime rate, tends to keep people isolated—which allows them to slip through the cracks too often. With the success of Fisherman’s Tale, LCS project coordinator Arnold Perry hoped that the project would help to stem that decline.

“We try to bring together people who too-often stay in their homes,” says Perry. “People need events like Fisherman’s Tale so that they don’t feel neglected and unwanted. Jesus told Peter to be a ‘fisherman of men,’ and that’s what we try to be.”

While the initial plan for the project was limited to senior citizens, the immediate appeal of Fisherman’s Tale allowed it to blossom much further. Thanks to a separate grant from Mount Ararat Baptist Church, Fisherman’s Tale began including children from Pittsburgh’s Paulson Community Center in their trips later in the summer. The addition leant a new element to the project’s title, allowing the seniors to tell their tales to a new generation of African-American youths.

“The kids that have come—I’m at a loss for words,” says Starzl. “They come and they listen to the guys, and afterwards, they tell their friends about it and their friends want to go, too. They want to go again and again. And that’s so important, because if we don’t get these guys to tell their stories, they will regret it, and one day the kids will regret it, too.”