How to Live Forever by Marc Freedman

Author:Marc Freedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2018-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

PUMPING UP THE VOLUME

Every year for the past decade, the World Economic Forum has organized a summer meeting. Unlike the “Winter Davos” held at Davos in Switzerland, the “Summer Davos” is convened in China. The formal name is the Annual Meeting of New Champions, the defining theme is innovation, and the participants are all heralded as disrupters of the status quo. In 2014, I was invited as a Social Entrepreneur of the Year.

In truth, there were a couple dozen Social Entrepreneurs of the Year, but I was honored and grateful nonetheless. When I began mingling, though, I had a sinking feeling, one I’d experienced often at other gatherings highlighting innovation—a sense of being alone. There was no one else there working to engage the talent and experience of older people or, for that matter, to bring this group together with young people.

This was all the more striking because the World Economic Forum’s leader, Klaus Schwab, was himself nearing eighty, at the height of his creativity and just about to come out with a new book about the coming trends reshaping society. We were in China, which is projected to have more older people by midcentury than the total US population. And, to add insult to injury, there was no lack of interest in longer lives. The gathering was awash in immortalists proclaiming breakthroughs in technology and medicine aimed at dramatically extending life and health.

There are advantages to being a token representative of an issue; the novelty value probably makes it easier to get selected for honors like this one. But, all organizational modesty aside, Encore.org alone isn’t going to get us to the promised land.

I came away from the Summer Davos convinced that we needed to pump up the volume on innovation. Since then, at Encore we have scraped together enough money to make small investments in social innovators of all ages with creative ideas for bringing the generations together. In our first year, with little fanfare, we got nearly two hundred applicants for the Gen2Gen Encore Prize. Most were grassroots leaders drawing inspiration from their own experiences and starting organizations to extend them into the wider community.

Nominees included Pushy Moms, a group of older mothers who helped their own kids apply to and graduate from college and are now using that experience to help largely first-generation students at LaGuardia Community College in New York apply for four-year degrees. And Grandmas2Go, a group that trains older people as coaches to help support struggling new parents. And Hire Autism, an organization that’s recruiting older mentors—perhaps parents or grandparents of children with autism—to help coach young people with autism who have graduated from high school but are struggling to find jobs. And, as we’re seeing in our second year with the Encore Prize, there are many more great ideas out there—hundreds, perhaps thousands.

I have to believe that Maggie Kuhn would be thrilled with all this dreaming and scheming, but I know we have a long way to go and many innovations to see before we achieve true age-integration in our daily lives.

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