Pushy Moms, Grandmas2Go, and Other Ways to Bridge the Generation Gap

Talking Eyes Media/Encore.org

Marc Freedman was a struggling freshman at Swarthmore College back in the mid-70s when a 60-something college administrator, Gil Stott, took the teenager under his wing. Stott and his “grandmotherly” assistant, Etta Zwell, “had a kind of Batman-and-Robin operation going, focused on bringing young people like me into the fold,” writes Freedman in his new book, How to Live Forever.

Freedman, now 60, has spent a third of his life leading an organization aimed at deploying more Batmen and Robins to help heal society’s ills. Twenty years ago this month, he founded what is now called Encore.org, a think tank in San Francisco aimed at putting more people over age 50 to work on behalf of social good. This month, he’s been awarded the Eisner Foundation’s Eisner Prize, given to recognize excellence in united generations for social good.

Encore.org

Freedman is currently spearheading Encore’s Gen2Gen campaign, which aims to get 1 million adults age 50 and over to “stand up and show up” for kids. He’s keen on grassroots groups like Pushy Moms, women who’ve gotten their kids into college who turn their attention to guiding first-generation college students, and Grandmas2Go, who visit the homes of first-time moms who lack sufficient support. The Gen2Gen campaign now involves 150 organizations and has attracted money from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Einhorn Family Charitable Trust, and other grant makers.

Two of the programs incubated at Encore are now run by AARP: Experience Corps, through which older volunteers tutor elementary schoolchildren in reading, and the Purpose Prize, which gives older people no-strings cash awards (currently $60,000 each for five annual winners) for their projects aimed at social good.

Encore still runs the Encore Fellowships program, an “internship for grown-ups,” as Freedman calls it, that offers midcareer professionals placements within nonprofits, easing a transition from the for-profit world. The program has placed more than 1,750 fellows so far.

Freedman spoke to the Chronicle about how older people are driving social-change innovations.

What are the biggest barriers to intergenerational collaboration?

It’s something that goes back to the beginnings of human history and evolution, that older people are essentially designed to invest in and support younger generations. And yet over the past 50 years we’ve made that far more difficult, even impossible. The two main culprits are a culture that encourages older people to hang onto their youth, to indulge in a golden-years second childhood. So we have a culture that doesn’t serve us well.

And second, we’ve got a whole set of institutions, many of them invented over the last half century, that keeps the generations from being able to interact in the places where we spend our daily lives.

We’ve got workplaces that are increasingly age-segregated. We’ve got housing arrangements that are often keeping people physically apart. Our education system rarely allows older and younger people to interact.

So we’ve taken something that’s deeply rooted in the human experience and made it close to impossible in our modern world.

Can you give us a progress report on the Gen2Gen program?

We’ve already recruited 1,100 leaders, and by the end of the year, we expect that 100,000 people will have joined the campaign.

And we’ve launched a new prize for early-stage ideas to bring the generations together for mutual benefit: the Encore Prize, which is in its second year. And it’s shown a rich array of activities happening at the grassroots level to more effectively engage older people in the lives of kids.

Among my favorites: a group at LaGuardia Community College called Pushy Moms, in which older women who have put their own kids through school are working with mostly immigrant students at LaGuardia Community College to help them move from a two-year institution to four-year colleges and universities. There’s Grandmas2Go, which is a family-support effort in Oregon. All over the country, there are numerous efforts.

In the book, I wrote about Now Teach, where Lucy Kellaway, who was a columnist for the Financial Times, quit her job in her late 50s, and became a math teacher in a low-income school in London — and she challenged her readers to quit their jobs and join her. More than 1,000 people came forward.

But she started the program with a young social entrepreneur and education expert named Katie Waldegrave. So this idea of two women — one in her late 50s, one in her late 20s — bringing together the assets of experience and youth to create something really powerful. It reflects an enormous opportunity for the generations to come together and work in tandem to solve significant problems.

Only 1 percent of foundation grants go for causes focused on older Americans. What can nonprofits do to encourage more support?

While there’s been encouraging activity in philanthropy to help the frail end of the older population — and it’s obviously important — philanthropy is overlooking the enormous opportunity in so many people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s who can contribute to society and efforts to unlock that potential. I would love to see more philanthropists embrace that opportunity that resides in the aging society, along with addressing the challenges and problems.

I began the book with a demographic reality that we’re not paying enough attention to: It’s not just that the society is growing older, but that for the first time ever we have more older people than younger ones. And that’s an enormously important shift. It’s a challenge culturally because we think of ourselves as a young nation. We always have. And that’s no longer true. But we can make that new configuration work.

I just got back from Los Angeles yesterday, where Sherry Lansing, the former head of Paramount Pictures and the founder of the Sherry Lansing Foundation, has created the EnCorps teacher program, getting retired professionals from the technology world to go into [science, technology, engineering, and math] teaching.

And Michael Eisner’s foundation has made bringing the generations together a central priority in its grant making.

So there are bright spots that are beginning to emerge in philanthropy. But over all, very few resources go toward aging.

I didn’t know that Encore.org works abroad. Are there specific parts of the world where you see promise for Encore’s mission?

It’s no surprise that places like Germany and South Korea are starting to address issues more aggressively because they’re aging at a rate that far exceeds the United States. In both of those countries, for example, more than 40 percent of the population will be over 60 by midcentury. So this is not a glancing, subtle shift. It’s nearly half the society.

And a number of other countries in Europe and Asia have similar demographics. Probably the most dramatic example so far is Singapore, which is investing $2.2 billion into becoming the envy of the world’s aging societies. And a strong focus of Singapore’s efforts is bringing the generations together, recapturing something that used to happen naturally in that country and much of Asia but in ways that fit our mobile, modern-family 21st-century world. They have a wonderful expression, of creating a kampong for all ages, kampong being the Malay word for “village.”

How should charities prepare their older volunteers for success?

That’s been a concern that is often raised, particularly in programs like Encore Fellowships, where you’ve got people coming into the social sector from successful midlife careers in corporations. Will they be haughty?

Nonprofits in general need to focus on, first, selecting for humility. Looking for people who genuinely want to contribute but don’t think they have all the answers. That’s been really important for us on the Encore Fellowships program. So we’ve preselected people who have an appreciation of the challenges of the nonprofit sector.

One of the big keys to success has been to put people in roles where they have a certain amount of comfort. So, for example, if they were working in HR or IT or marketing in their previous life, that they’re still doing that kind of work, but they’re doing it in the new environment with a different set of operating principles and priorities. And this balance between the comfort of doing tasks that are familiar but also the challenge of doing them in a new environment, it seems to work really well. A chance for both growth and security at the same time.

We hear so much about the divide between the young and old. But of all the divides in our society, this is the most bridgeable. It’s one that we can fix, and that can fix us.

This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.

Correction: A previous version of this article misspelled Gil Stott’s last name and said the Encore Fellowships had placed more than 750 fellows instead of more than 1,750.