I’ve heard the question so many times from people interested in cogenerational programming: “Are young people really going to show up to connect with older people?” We know, from our nationally representative study with NORC at the University of Chicago in 2022, that...
Purpose Prize
The Latest from CoGenerate
Want to Recruit Younger People? Look Within
For the past five years, I’ve been working as an advocate for the causes I believe in and for more intergenerational collaboration. Young people like me want more opportunities to work across generations for change, but we also want to be treated as equals. To...
What Young Leaders Want — And Don’t Want — From Older Allies
We know from our nationally representative study with NORC at the University of Chicago in 2022 that 76% of Gen Z and 70% of Millennial respondents wish they had more opportunities to work across generations for change. In a new report, What Young Leaders Want — And...
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Stewart Brand
Purpose Prize Fellow 2006
Nurturing long-term thinking and long-term responsibility
Technology has brought breathtaking change to modern life, but it’s also left us with a collective attention span shrinking precipitously, and that, to Stewart Brand is a risk to civilization. Known for creating the Whole Earth Catalogue, Brand, 67, co-founded the Long Now Foundation in 1995 to develop a coherent and compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking and long-term responsibility. Here was a way, he thought, to consider otherwise intractable or invisible problems. The Foundation embraced several projects, including a 10,000-year clock inside a remote Nevada mountain; an online collection of the world’s living languages (the Rosetta Project); a publicly-available digital preservation and archiving project; and seminars focusing on long-term thinking. In 1997, Brand presented a BBC television series, “How Buildings Learn,” building on his book by the same title published three years earlier. and in 1999, wrote The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, a series of essays on long-term thinking. While hundreds have attended Long Now seminars, the Foundation’s greatest audience has been on the Web, where up to 30,000 people a month download the free audio recorded lectures.