Updated October 24, 2021 at 3:27 PM ET
Would you move to a small Indiana town for on-demand grandparents?
That's part of the benefit of moving to Greensburg, Ind., a town that's offering incentives for new residents who move there, including $5,000 in cash, a YMCA membership, gift cards to the local farmers market and a service they're calling "Grandparents on Demand."
Greensburg is about 50 miles southeast of Indianapolis. It's a small community with a population of about 12,000. But the town is hoping to grow and one of the incentives it's offering is having grandparents on standby.
Tami Wenning, the director of the Decatur County Community Foundation, and her husband Dan are the grandparents up-f0r-grabs in town. They've held local positions in town and hosted foreign exchange students in the past — and they are also grandparents themselves. Stepping in to be grandparents, or babysitters at times, to help out new residents would help ease the transition into moving to Greensburg, Wenning said.
"When we have a grandparents day thing, it's packed," Wenning told NPR's Weekend Edition. "I would be more than happy to go to school and be there for a child so they don't have to go without a grandma."
In order to meet eligibility requirements for the benefits, you'd have to move to Greensburg within the next 6-12 months, have a remote job that's based outside the town, be at least 18 years old and eligible to work in the U.S.
Hafsa Fathima and Melissa Gray produced and edited the audio segment.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
