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What exactly do Gen Z and Millennial leaders want from older leaders, allies and colleagues? And how do they believe intergenerational collaboration — or cogeneration — can be improved?
On March 14, we published What Young Leaders Want — And Don’t Want — From Older Allies, a qualitative research study from CoGenerate and 31 young leaders who are committed to working across generations for change. This event was a special research briefing on the findings.
Speakers included:
The event also featured 5 young leaders who participated in the study:
Transcript:
Marc Freedman
Hello, my name is Marc Freedman. I’m the founder and Co-CEO of CoGenerate. And I just want to welcome everyone who’s joined us tonight and to say thank you. And also to tell you quickly why we decided to launch this project. Two years ago, we did a study with the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago to ask a simple question: are older and younger people interested in coming together to collaborate in helping to solve some of the biggest problems facing the country today? And the answer was a resounding yes. Which was extremely heartening in the big picture sense. It was also a relief to us since we had just rebranded as CoGenerate, with a mission of bringing older and younger people together to do just that. So we were very much gratified that there was a deep interest out there in doing that. But we learned so much more from that study. One of the most significant findings is that older people were keen on working on climate and the environment across generational lines, while younger people wanted to work with older people on mental health. In particular, both groups were interested in collaborating on improving education. But perhaps the biggest surprise in that research study was that the strongest interest in all of working collaboratively across age and generation came from young people, and across the board from individuals of color. And the young people in that study, you could hear their voices coming through. The message to people my age, and I’m 66, I was born in 1958, was that you can’t contribute to these problems (older people) and then pat us on the back as younger people and say, ‘It’s yours to solve.’ But the message that was equally powerful is that no one generation can tackle these issues on its own. We can only be successful by coming together. And the young people and the older people in the survey had something else to say as well, which is that it’s too hard to work together in our age segregated world. In fact, we have very little practice even talking to each other. And so that’s the reason we decided to go further and to try to understand what was on people’s minds starting with with young people. And through giving young people the floor which this report does and which the webinar today is an attempt to do. And I’m so grateful to the panelists for participating in in this project. For all 31 young leaders who contributed and for those who are on the webinar today, and I also, in the spirit of not being able to do this alone, I want to thank AARP and the Eisner Foundation for their support of this initiative and for the work that they’re doing in so many other ways to bring generations together to connect, collaborate and cocreate a better future for everyone. And with that, I want to turn it over to the wonderful CEO and our longtime partner Jo Ann Jenkins of AARP for a message that will lead us off today.
Jo Ann Jenkins
Welcome, everyone. I’m Jo Ann Jenkins, CEO of AARP. I want to thank you for joining us for this important briefing on CoGenerate’s research study: What Young Leaders Want and Don’t Want From Older Allies. For those of you who aren’t familiar with AARP, we are the nation’s largest nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to empowering people to choose how they live as they age. While we serve over 100 million Americans aged 50 and older and their families. Our purpose is to empower people to choose how they live as they age, not just when they’re older. Aging well is a lifelong pursuit that begins the day we are born and ends the day we die. If there’s one thing we’ve learned at AARP over the years, it’s that if you want to have a good life when you’re older, you have to begin preparing when you’re younger. We are all products of the choices we make throughout our lives. We’ve also learned that when we combine the experience people have gained over a lifetime with the creativity, ingenuity and energy of younger generations, we can work together for mutual benefit and impact, bridge the generation gap, create new solutions for how people live and age, and solve pressing social problems. That’s why we are supporting this research and why we support CoGenerate. AARP has been working with Mark, Eunice and the CoGenerate team for almost 25 years. AARP now operates two programs founded by CoGenerate, AARP Experience Corps, and AARP Purpose Prize, both of which bring generations together to address social issues. We believe in collaboration among the generations, and we’re always looking for ways to improve it. By better understanding what young leaders want and don’t want from older allies. We believe we can empower more people to choose how they live as they age, and make the world a better place for all generations.
Marc Freedman
Thank you so much, Jo Ann. And it’s my pleasure to introduce my colleague and Co-CEO Eunice Lin Nichols, who is going to kick off the panel introduce the panelists. And for me and I know for Eunice as well, this work is enormously important for the future of our society. Alreadywe’re the most age diverse society in human history. A quarter of the population is under 20. A quarter of the population is over 60. That’s our future. It’s it’s a future of people have four or five generations working together collaborating, trying to create a better world. But for me, and for Eunice too, this is personal. We were both young people who had a strong desire to work with our elders on these issues. And as we’ve grown older that desire to work across generational lines has continued. And it’s one of the reasons that I enjoy so much working with you, Eunice. So I’ll hand the platform over to you and help get this thing started.
Eunice Lin Nichols
Thanks, Marc. This is this has been an exciting event. I’ve been looking forward to it for quite a while. As Marc mentioned, I was 25 when I first met him and became a young leader in the Encore movement that he founded. And I spent many years being the youngest in the room and even more rarely the youngest at the table making decisions. And I’m grateful for the many older mentors and allies who shared opportunities, their networks their power with me, including Marc. But the reality is that at the same time, there were older adults along the way, often very well intentioned, whose comments attitudes and actions made it challenging to work together towards the better future that I knew we both wanted. It’s one of the reasons why I’m so excited today to introduce you to five of the 31 young leaders who contributed to this report. Their insights and very concrete recommendations for bridging generational divides are both disarmingly honest and urgently needed for these times. Some of those insights deeply resonated with my own experiences working alongside older adults in my 20s, including some things I wish I’d had the opportunity and frankly, the courage to raise at the time, other insights that they had feel unique to this new generation of leaders and are insights I personally commit to engaging with as I near 50, and am in transition to becoming the kind of elder that I’ve spent my whole career supporting. So with that, we’re going to play a quick video right now to introduce you to the five incredible leaders I’ll be talking with today. You’re in for a treat.
Dillon St. Bernard
My role has really been using storytelling as a tool of activism. I think it’s so important for young people’s voices to be amplified. Because throught those stories is a potential to prompt transformative action. Folks have lots of things to say they just don’t have the platforms to say them on this is kind of young people’s turn at bat is to reimagine, I think, every system that doesn’t work, including the media.
Jordan Bowman
By the nature of being a mentor, I kind of model the things that I value. We really focus on this question is like, what does it mean to be a man of integrity? So integrity is, is when my thoughts, actions and beliefs line up. You know, this, this is what I’m gonna say, This is what I say I want. And then, you know, this is what I believe about that. And here are how my actions line up in integrity, with those thoughts and beliefs.
Serena Bian
One of the central questions that we ask at the Office of the Surgeon General regarding our country’s need for addressing the crisis of mental health and loneliness, and community connection, mental wellness, is what kinds of infrastructure of care are required? Or do we need to build for across all generations and communities so that we can be good hosts to one another,
Emily Garcia-Green
I grew up in a politically divided family, I honestly thought there’s no way that people from across the spectrum can actually sit down and have a civil productive conversation with each other. People are being isolated from each other. There’s not a lot of camaraderie or community in current American society. Outside of your political tribe, people don’t trust each other. That’s the reason why we do this work.
Loren Waters
[Cherokee language]. Hi, everyone. My name is Loren Waters. My dream is to protect the environment through storytelling. I love working in the film industry, because I feel like it’s a chance for indigenous people to tell our stories from our perspective. And historically, we haven’t had the opportunity to do that. It’s about indigenous people coming together to solve issues that impact all of us.
Eunice Lin Nichols
Welcome Serena, Dillon, Loren, Jordan and Emily. Gonna get you all on video here. I feel deeply honored to share this space with the five of you today. And to hear your reflections on the insights that were highlighted in this new report. As we dig in, I want to encourage our audience to put questions in the Q&A feature in Zoom. I see we have some already. To Sam, and the other person who posted anonymously: yes, we will be sharing a recording of this later. And you can feel free to share that with others after this event. So please put your questions in the Q&A. I’ll save some time at the end to surface as many of your questions as I can. Okay, so over to our five special guests. Each of you is working on urgent issues facing our country today. And just as importantly, each of you is committed to doing your work cogenerationally. So it puts you in the bullseye of the kind of person working at the intersection of generational connection that we want to learn from. I’m going to start with you Dillon, Dillon St. Bernard. He’s a 24-year-old communications director at Future Coalition which supports movements that address urgent community needs that are led by and for young people. One of the key insights from the report is that contrary to media stereotypes of generational conflict, young leaders, in fact, value the wisdom and experience of older leaders, colleagues and allies. Dillon, I’m wondering if that rings true for you? And if so, where does your sense of intergenerational connection and interdependence come from, and how does it play out in your own life?
Dillon St. Bernard
Thanks for that question for this holding space for us to be in conversation. I think as this report names, 76% of Gen Z wish they hadn’t more opportunities to work across generations and that is true of a lot of my own experiences. So for the last five years or so I’ve worked exclusively in movement spaces, and almost exclusively in cogenerational spaces, so much of the work I have been doing as a communicator, in climate and civic engagement and everything else in between that centers young and multicultural folks. There has been young, there’s been young people and adult allies working hand in hand. So often when we’re seeing people out in front there is the lot of the times the operational infrastructure, it iss the funding that isn’t really supporting them. And that’s the power to that that’s really important for this to be pushed along in terms of intergenerational change. In this report, I named that I worked with a colleague who was over 40 years over my age, older than me. And we really had a shared understanding because our our shared vision was that we wanted to use political power in order to drive change. So we started there. And I think so much of as Gen Z as young people reimagine business as usual. I think there also needs to be a conversation on like, what brings us together. So I often start there around, you know, what brings you here to adult allies. So what brings you here, what brings me here, you know what, as a young person, what brings me here could be getting to reach where you are, as an older allie, what brings you here could be fighting for the world you wish you had at my age, yout dreams that you still have and have had. So that’s really the kind of framework that I often think about in in cogenerational spaces is like, let’s start there. And then let’s build power, because I really think of cogenerational work as this dance. It’s difficult sometimes, but it’s also exciting at the core, it’s really rewarding.
Eunice Lin Nichols
Thank you for that framing, Dylan. And I love that you’re already in some ways, addressing one of the questions in the Q&A that asked why we even use the term cogeneration, which comes from the energy sector. Your framing around the importance of sharing power, and distributing that more equally, is one of the reasons we’ve been leaning into this term. I would love to bring Jordan’s perspective into this conversation. So Jordan is the executive director of Journeyman Triangle, a nonprofit that mentors adolescent boys in their transition into becoming men of integrity. Jordan, you and I have had some back and forth around my desire to grow into the kind of elder that’s a good ally to young people. Now that I’m just two years shy of 50. And in that context, you shared a little bit about your perspective around younger people playing a role in ascribing meaning to elderhood. So I’d like to have you speak just a little bit on your experience with elders, the role they’ve played in your life and the role you play in their lives and how that interaction has been shaped over the years.
Jordan Bowman
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I appreciated our LinkedIn interaction there. And one of the things I want to point out is that elderhood is not an age. I believe that it is a way of being and one of my favorite, one of my authors on this topic is Stephen Jenkinson. And he talks about the difference between an “older” and an “elder.” And he teases that out in a lot of ways, but one of the ways that I think it’s really important is that an elder is someone who chooses to face their pain consciously, they choose to lean into life. And instead of running away or hiding, or avoiding, they say, “I mean this, I’m here. Whatever happens, I’m gonna grow through this and learn through it.” And personally, I’ve been blessed to have a lot of amazing elders in my life of all ages, but also particularly Boomers and Gen X and folks who are a little bit older than me. When I was 18, or 19, I was a part of a community, Journeymen, back then it was called Boys to Men. And a lot of my mentors saw something in me before I saw it in myself, they were able to say “this guy, he’s got something and we’re gonna give him more responsibility than he thinks he’s ready to handle.” If it was up to me, I probably wouldn’t have said yes. But they, they saw a glimpse and they witnessed my becoming, my process of becoming, and they called me into that next level of leadership in my life, and really that requires wisdom. It requires insight requires the conscious elderhood that Eunice, I’m sure you will become and you are becoming. And really, in our organization, Journeymen, the mentoring organization I run now, this informs our mentor training. We talk a lot about accepting young men where they are and accepting them with with the masculine nurturing with an empathy with non judgment, while simultaneously holding them to a higher level, encouraging maturity, encouraging growth. And that is what we consider more of a masculine challenge. And the mentor’s role is fundamentally: how do you do both simultaneously?, It seems like a paradox. And luckily, I’ve had a lot of folks who’ve been able to do that with me. And over the years, I’m able to give that back as as a good elder, as an elder-in-training. As I like to say.
Eunice Lin Nichols
That’s great. Yes, Elder-in-training. So that’s such a useful perspective, as we think about bringing older and younger people together, I think sometimes, there can be an assumption that the older person is there to be the mentor. And something I learned from the report and listening to some of the conversations you all have had is that when that mentorship is just assumed and brought to the forefront first, it can actually end up feeling a little transactional, which is the opposite of what is actually desired. So I want to highlight one of the learnings in the report, which was that personal connection, before collaboration, always, I think, was the phrase. So Loren, I want to bring you into this conversation to talk about the importance of connecting on a human level. And for those of you can remember from the video, Loren is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and the Kiowa tribe. She’s 28, and an award winning filmmaker working on a new documentary that I hope you will all check out when it comes out called Meet Me at the Creek. Loren, why is personal connection important to you above all else? And could you maybe share an example of what an older ally said or did that made it clear to you that they wanted to get to know you as a person first?
Loren Waters
Yeah. Thank you, Eunice. And it’s really exciting to see so many people here on the webinar today, to learn about the report. And the quote that I have in the report kind of makes me sound a little cold of being like, “I don’t want, like any collaboration unless, you know, you have a relationship with me.” But at the same time, I’m like, you know, I think that there’s levels to that, of course, and, for me, I was really thinking about it working in the film industry, in particular, because I’m probably one of the youngest background casting directors in the industry. And I’ve worked on multimillion dollar television shows and movies. And it took me one season of being a production assistant, to be promoted to a department head. And so I didn’t have any experience background casting. And a lot of that was because the producers and the showrunner Sterlin Harjo, and particularly this is on Reservation Dogs, it’s on Hulu, believed in putting people in the community into positions that they could succeed in, even if they didn’t have the experience and just, you know, giving them the opportunity to succeed and fail. And that’s really unheard of, in Hollywood. If I was living in LA or in New York, I really don’t think that would have been the same. And this industry is full of people who, you know, I just think that are like paying your dues, which we’ll touch on later. But I think it’s just important to develop a basic understanding of, you know, how we can work together, before approaching someone just like off the bat. And then also, you know, as coming from a background as an indigenous person. It’s been really extractive in the past working in this industry. And so, I suggest, to build a connection before reaching out to people, especially when it comes to someone that’s a different age from you different background in order to understand you know, our story, because when times get tough, it’s better to have empathy and be able to collaborate more when you understand where they’re coming from. And then one last thing I’ll kind of touch on with that is in the industry, there’s this consultant model that exists where they, you know, a lot of non natives or people who are looking to tell stories will approach our communities and, you know, doesn’t matter what age and want to have people kind of sign off as a consultant, even though they don’t have – the people trying to tell the story – don’t have any experience in what they’re trying to tell. And so I think that a lot of indigenous people in the industry are trying to get rid of this consultant model and really trying to invest in each other, rather than, you know, just bringing on someone do the I can, like, check a box.
Eunice Lin Nichols
Yeah, that makes so much sense to do it in that more relational way. Serena, I think it’s a good moment to bring you into the conversation, because you’re one of the most relational people I’ve ever met. So Serena Bian. She’s 27-years-old. She served as a Special Advisor to the US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, and focuses on the public health crisis of loneliness and disconnection in our country. Full disclosure, she’s also a CoGenerate board member and a chaplain in training as if that weren’t enough things on her plate. But Serena, in many conversations we’ve had and conversations that informed this report, you spoke of intergenerational relationships teaching you the importance of slowing down to connect deeply. Why do you think that’s so important to bridging generational differences?
Serena Bian
Thank you, Eunice. I think it’s important because the challenges that we face today are so big and intense, and the divides are so deep. And so it always begs the question for me, then. What kinds of relationships do we need, that can be resilient enough to sustain these messy and mixed times? A quick anecdote I’ll share is that nearly every community that I’m a part of, is moving through some form of relational challenge, it seems every gathering I’ve participated in, no matter how skilled the facilitators, has held a level of, I think, conflict and tension, more than I’ve previously experienced. And I think this is simply just a reflection of the collective consciousness, you know, disharmonized by war, by inequality by climate change, etc. And, so I always turn to the wisdom and teachings of civil rights activist Grace Lee Boggs, who talks about how it is during these times that we need to move at the Speed of Relationship and the Speed of Trust. And so the collaborations that I’ve found intergenerationally, to be the most resilient have been the ones where we’re just moving, actually, as friends, and refusing to be bound by the limits of professionalism, and really focused on sharing more about our lives, our life stories, and just from that deep place of care. A quick story I’ll share is there’s an elder who’s in his 80s. And we’re engaged in a deep collaboration, mentorship, organizational work together, and we always begin with a personal check-in to really just acknowledge that while the work is so important, oftentimes, it’s you know, our families, our relationships, kids health, like that’s the stuff that is on most of our hearts, and being able to bring that into a collaboration just, I think, really roots us in commitment to each other. And that’s important, because I think inevitably, when disagreement or difference arise, I feel a greater sense of integrity – a need to do right by this relationship with this person, because of the ways that we’re so intertwined. And last week, I had to deliver a particularly challenging piece of feedback to this collaborator and friend. And yet, because I knew that we were committed to each other, I knew that it was right to do and ultimately of service to our work.
Eunice Lin Nichols
That’s so important. And it touches on another insight from the report, which was worded “Productive Conflict: Digital Natives Have Few Models.” And how important it is to actually bring forward in-person relationships and communities where that conflict can play out and be modeled in really healthy ways. So I appreciate those concrete stories. All right, I’m gonna move to a somewhat related topic that Loren brought up, which is the insight around paying your dues isn’t working anymore. And I would love Emily Garcia-Green to address this. And you’ll see why in a second. Emily is the 23-year-old chief Youth Development Officer at BridgeUSA, which is an amazing multi-partisan student movement focused on championing viewpoint diversity and healthy political discourse. That may seem unachievable today, but that is something Emily and her colleagues are working on. So she manages their high school chapters. So Emily, I’d love you to reflect on the sort of, I would say one of the more edgy insights in our report: this concept of “paying your dues” isn’t working for your generation, the way it might have for previous generations. I think that’s a concept that’s frankly, a little challenging for older generations to grapple with. So I’d love to get your thoughts on like, where does that come from? And what does it mean to intergenerational relationship building?
Emily Garcia-Green
Yeah, thank you for that question. And it actually sparked out of a conversation that I was having with my father. <y father is a first generation Mexican-American. So for him, he had this idea of, if he paid his dues, then he was going to have fulfilled and live the American dream. So one time we were having this conversation and my father just was not understanding why myself and why a lot of my friends and Generation Z, why we’re not attracted to this idea of showing up to work early, or staying late, working a typical nine to five, staying at a company for 30-plus years, like maybe my father’s generation has, and we just were experiencing this conflict. He wasn’t understanding my perspective. And I really wasn’t understanding his perspective, until I started to realize that at the core of this is that we were looking at two different landscapes. And that’s when I kind of started to talk about it from that perspective of when he was paying his dues, it was to fulfill this American Dream, which he then got to fulfill, he got to buy the house, he got to have a stable income, he had a stable career, he was able to have his children and raise them in a stable climate. Whereas Generation Z, we’re looking at the price of a median home in America being over $400,000, home ownership may not be a reality for my generation. There’s studies showing that we might be the first generation that doesn’t do better than our parent’s generations and previous generations to come. We have very real threats that we’re looking at in terms of politics, the climate change crisis, the student debt loan crisis, all of these different areas where we’re looking at it and we’re saying, okay, paying your dues used to mean that you could live a very comfortable life. Now, if I pay my dues, I’m not guaranteed a comfortable life. And I’m also not guaranteed work life balance, or the opportunity to prioritize these other elements of my life that actually make my life feel really rich. Once I explained that to my father, then we got to have a much more interesting conversation, where he was like, okay, I can kind of see where you’re coming from. And I was like, yes. That’s why it’s so important to have these conversations intergenerationally is because we might be talking about the same issues, but we may not be looking at them from the same lens. And then that’s where we can actually talk about, okay: what does the world look like where young people don’t feel like they have to pay their dues? Also, what what does the world look like, where older people don’t feel like they have to pay their “dues” either? What does a world look like where we can work together to really create a workplace where we can achieve great success, have great work life balance, which is very important for Generation Z, and also work together to just create a better world?
Eunice Lin Nichols
Thanks, Emily. I think this concept is important for us to think through and to hear all these different perspectives. Loren, you had already raised in a sort of traditional hierarchical sector, like the film industry, that concept of paying your dues can really hold back lived experience, especially as we’re telling stories about certain cultures, certain people. Is there anything else you wanted to add to the earlier comments that you made? Just want to give you a chance to circle back to that.
Loren Waters
Yeah. Emily, that was amazing. I loved what you shared, I feel like it’s like perfect for me to kind of follow up with my experience, given a lot of that context and real issues that we have to face as younger people in the society, and I do often ask myself, like, what are we missing out on when we make people play into the narrative of paying your dues when personal life experience, talent, drive – kind of override the professional work experience. And I don’t think it’s black and white, either. I think that, you know, in a hierarchical way, there is some value to, you know, having some experience and being able to be in certain positions for a little bit of time. But I do also think that it’s really important that we, that older people who may have more power in these types of structures, give that opportunity to younger people who have that potential and have the ability to step up into that space. Because looking back and that example that I talked about earlier, just like me, being a casting director now, I wouldn’t be able to be where I am if it wasn’t for the people believing in me and allowing me to just have confidence in myself and then also, ask a ton of questions. Like I was actually looking back in my email yesterday, and I was like, oh, man, like the types of questions I was asking are like, so basic, but also so essential for me to learn how to do what I was doing. And I’m really grateful to the people that believed in me, because now I can step into my career. And I can earn an income and I can work on different projects. And I think that especially in Oklahoma, there’s only like a specific number of film projects that come through. And I don’t want to move to LA or New York to get caught up in the cause of all of that in the film industry. And so, you know, indigenous people and people of color might have less, you know, opportunities to rise up to those, in those positions. And one of the things that I want to share is, there’s a crazy statistic that I often go back to. It’s in the 2020 Hollywood Diversity Report, they found that native representation is between 0.3 to 0.5%, in film, and then even less than TV. And so I’m really working in my career to change this statistic and put more people in positions in the industry, regardless of age and working with older folks and younger folks, just to create more representation all around. And I think it’s just important to have leaders who understand the value in that and know that we just need a little push to get going and, and we’re off to the races.
Eunice Lin Nichols
That’s great. There’s so much that I have learned from listening to you all talk and from the report, and there’s probably no topic that I’ve personally learned more about from young people than the topic of mental health. So it’s no surprise that came out as one of the major insights that young people wanted older adults to know. And that’s that we need to actively reduce the stigma of mental health and demand better and more equitable solutions. Serena, your work with the US Surgeon General on the loneliness epidemic, for people of all generations means you have a unique view of the mental health crisis in our country. How do you think intergenerational relationships specifically can play a constructive role in addressing mental health challenges for older and youngers? And I might tack on a question on just like – have you seen any promising solutions out there?
Serena Bian
Well, from my work in the Office of the Surgeon General, in which we’ve really tried to uplift the crisis of loneliness, we just know that it is the older people and younger people in our society who experience the highest levels of loneliness. And so it’s just kind of like how a puzzle piece fits together, there’s just so much opportunity to create more moments and places and experiences for these generations to come together and collaborate. One thing I’ll point out that I find so important is, you know, it’s not just to collaborate, to find ways to connect to become a less lonely society. I think that’s important. But I also think there’s just this opportunity to really look at what is beloved community, what is the vision of collective well-being, that that we can come together across generations to build? Because, you know, there is so much social and ecological pain and bringing peace, healing and justice to the world requires more requires real committed communities of spirit and service. And Eunice you asked a question around, are there any exampes or models, and I’ll just share personally from my life, one of the dearest communities to me is called Nuns and Nones and we’re a multi-generational, multi-spiritual, multiracial community of about 25 of us that are scattered across the country. And we’re interested in orienting our lives towards community spirit and justice is what we say and very practically, are building place-based projects around what does hospitality mean, welcoming in the stranger or mutual aid projects, or immigration and migration advocacy. And the work is not only strengthened due to the fact that we range from our 20s to the 80s. But it really requires us doing that, given that we’re all in such different life contexts and stages. And so, across this country, I think there are so many emerging efforts of young people and olders coming together to create new community structures of belonging to meet this moment. And, again, the intergenerational component is essential. And my sense is that when we have these cultures of care, really all of our mental, emotional and spiritual well being will be taken care of. And finally, I think there’s just something that is very healing about intergenerational relationships that take place outside of our immediate family contexts. There’s something very healing about, yeah, having the distance from the weight and baggage of family (though family is you know, so can be so healing and amazing) that I have found to be beautiful and necessary and observing so many friends and across so many communities as well.
Eunice Lin Nichols
Thanks for that Serena and I’m weaving in some questions that I’ve seen in the Q+A on the fly. So thank you all for for going with me on that. Emily, I want to circle back to something we talked before about before, which is younger, younger leaders sometimes not having productive examples of conflict. And something we don’t often talk about is how toxic conflict can impact mental health. And how much of our current political and national discourse right now feels pretty toxic. Impacting younger people for sure, but older as well. Can you speak a little bit from your experience at BridgeUSA, about that mental health tie in to conflict?
Emily Garcia-Green
Yes, I actually love this question. Because I think that it’s so important to answer how do we have healthy conflict? And how can we have productive political conversations, especially across generations without sacrificing our mental health? And that’s a question that we work to answer every day, if I’m being honest, at BridgeUSA. And I want to share just like a quick little anecdote from what I’m hearing from our high schoolers is that they’re actually telling us that they don’t want to have really deep meaningful relationships with their grandparents, because they’re scared to have some of these really difficult, hard conversations. And they feel like there’s a risk to really have these conversations with their grandparents and elders in their life. And I think that that’s really sad, because my grandparents played such a core role in my life, really making it a rich life. And there’s a lot of fun memories that I have, and some difficult conversations that I had to have with them, too. So something that we tried to do at BridgeUSA, to have these productive conversations is actually give younger people the toolset to have these conversations. So we have four norms that we establish as like boundaries for having productive conversations, I’m not going to go over all of them, I’m just gonna go over two that I think are some of the most important for Gen Z. The first one is is that we prevent ad hominem attacks. And I encourage anyone to apply this norm to every conversation that they have, whether it’s conflict over where to go get dinner, or conflict over climate change, or Black Lives Matter, or these other intense issues. And that’s saying that in this conversation, I’m not going to attack you, your personality, your identity, anything that makes you who you are, I’m just going to talk about the discussion and the merits of your argument. That establishes a lot of trust between both of the participants, and it really lowers the risk of, you know, conversations like this can be really scary. And this kind of alleviates, okay, at least know that I and who I am is not going to be attached to this conversation. The second one is that we tell people you’re showing up as your unique self. So talk about your identity, talk about who you are, bring stories, but also just know that you’re just speaking for yourself, you’re not speaking on behalf of your whole generation or another identity that you belong with, because that’s a really heavy, like load to bear. And what we see when we have those two elements in place, is that students actually have the freedom to discuss these really important issues. And they can actually lean into the uncomfortableness of talking about these things. Because when we lean into the uncomfortableness, that’s when we’re actually doing the hard work. That’s when we’re building trust with people that we didn’t think that we can have trust with. That’s where we’re really like building the bridges that we need to have those communities that Serena was talking about, to really have camaraderie, and not just collaboration, but to have trust. And to have a sense of, wow, this person actually wants to understand me and they’re curious about who I am. And we believe at BridgeUSA, that that will pave the way to reinvigorating the social infrastructure in America, not only between Gen Z amongst themselves, but really between Gen Z and all other generations.
Eunice Lin Nichols
Thanks, Emily. That work that you’re doing feels more urgent than ever right now. I want to make sure we have time to bring in more questions from the audience. I’m going to round out with the final insight and I’m gonna have Dillon, you and Jordan address this one, which is the insight that suggests that the future of leadership is cogenerational. That there’s a model beyond just passing the torch, beyond passing the torch that there’s a way in which we can come alongside each other. Dylan, talk to us about what this looks like in reality and how you think it could change systems and transform our society for the better if we thought more in a cogenerational leadership way.
Dillon St. Bernard
Thanks for that question. I think for me cogenerational power building is our greatest strength. And I think it’s allows us to build farther and more strategically. And again, I’m saying that as somebody who works almost exclusively in cogenerational spaces, where we’ve gotten to really, you know, turn kind of online power to, you know, over a million people in the streets, now billions of impressions turning into 10s of 1000s of folks engaged online, like that is the power of, for me, a direct example of the power of cogenerational leadership. And I think so much of this, to me is about, you know, is a reminder to seek out those cogenerational relationships. Really, you know, at the core is starting in a space where we’re just building connections and building community and seeing what that becomes. Because that’s been a lot of my experience. I started full-time in the nonprofit space when I was 19. I started my agency when I was 21. That doesn’t happen unless folks, you know, to the points named earlier, and we’re giving folks an opportunity to be like, we see something in you to do it then for earlier. And I believe in you. It’s been my biggest fight of like I believed in me enough to start the conversation, but you believe in me enough for me to continue that and really go deeper. So I think so much of this is about really inviting those conversations. And really, you know, I think this is also about sharing power. I think that is where this comes down to us. How much power are you willing to give up in order to really build more strategically for the future for this generation and the future generation? So I think that is where we have to start this conversation is, are you willing to step into that and allow folks to step into their power?
Eunice Lin Nichols
Yeah. And I think to add to that, something we’ve been learning from a collaboration with some friends, colleagues at Citizen University is to lean into the idea that to push against the idea that power is finite. And that when we cogenerate, we actually generate more power, get us out of that zero sum thinking. All right, Jordan, you’re gonna bring us home on the official questions here. Which is there was a an insight that came up in the conversations that were, frankly quite surprising to myself and many other olders in the room that I think we need to hear and wrestle with. So tell us why it rubs you the wrong way when older people say, “You are the future, you’re gonna solve the problems of the world. We’re so inspired by you.” That feels like an objectively good thing to say. So break that down for us.
Jordan Bowman
Yeah, yeah. And I want to be clear, I want folks to have for the future. But when I hear that phrase, I guess I’ll start by saying, I’m also the youngest person in the room, I have been for many years. Sounds like I’m in good company, that that’s been a part of my trajectory. When I was, you know, 18,19 20, that was my goal. I said, “I’m going to be the youngest person in the room.” And it’s worked out really well. And there’s been times when I have to speak for my entire generation. To Emily’s point, I was invited to speak for entire millennial, (I’m actually a Zillenial, I’m right in between). So I was, I was asked to speak for both. And the reality is, it was a, it was an unearned burden. And I felt profoundly alone. In those moments when I heard “you are the future.” It was displacement, or a bypassing, or a projection where I was taking on the the weight of all the problems that came before me. And in some way, that’s true. Like, yes, we are the future, young people are the future. And yet, my focus has been how do we change that from you are the future to WE are the future? How do we switch the YOU to a WE. And what I’ve learned over the years is, especially in our Journeymen Circles, is that we’re not rescuing these young men from the adventure of their life, they have to go out, and they have to take on the burden of the world. But we’re also not leaving them alone and saying, you have to do it by yourself. We’re showing up as mentors. And we’re really, we’re really saying “I’m here. And as long as you’re in this, I’m in this with you, and let’s build together.” You know, we’re there to support, to learn alongside, to grow. And, yeah, that’s that’s pretty much it. I mean, the idea is, we want to move from “you are the future” to “let’s build this thing together.” When I get that response from people, when folks say “you are the future,” I usually say “Thank you. I appreciate you for. you know, sharing your hope that you have with me and my abilities. And let’s build this thing together.” We’re not going to be in this alone. I think all the statistics, and everything we’re looking at as far as trends is – there’s going to be more intergenerational teams. We’re going to need the insight and wisdom. We have new tech but a lot of the problems are the same if you simplify it down We’re dealing with some of the same things. So that’s what I’d have to say on that.
Eunice Lin Nichols
Appreciate that. It’s leaning into the “Co” the “with.”
Jordan Bowman
Exactly, yeah.
Eunice Lin Nichols
And we circle back to where we began, which is at the end of the day, it’s all about relationships, the sense that we’re in it together. I want to invite Marc to come off camera or on camera, whichever one it is. There we go. We want to see M arc, for the Q+A, in part, because as we’ve been tracking the questions, I think there are a couple that feel like they’re good questions for you. So one that has percolated through the q&a is, why have we decided to only have younger people as panelists, why aren’t there some boomers on this panel? I think he’d be perfect to answer that.
Marc Freedman
Sure, I, you know, I, when I started this organization, I started it with a man by the name of John Gardner who was exactly 50 years older than I was, and he was, he was a wise elder. He was Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. He’s the person who implemented Medicare, he created the organization common cause. And one of the things that I learned from him, he said that his whole life changed when he learned that it was more important to be interested than to be interesting. He spent the whole first half of his life trying to be interesting, and the second half of his life focus on listening. And I think that’s the spirit that that we were hoping to bring to the conversation today. And there was something else he said to me, too, that goes to the we’re the future comments that Jordan was just saying. Over the battles of Medicare in 1965, where the physicians are opposing it. He said in one of his speeches, “America today faces breathtaking opportunities, disguised as unsolvable problems.” And I think when you know, people hear about a society of older and younger people, they think it’s going to be an unsolvable problem. Kids versus canes, a zero sum contest, but but in fact, just to go to something Serena said about putting the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together, you don’t get the wholeness of life or a whole society unless these these groups come together.
Eunice Lin Nichols
Thank you, Marc. I want to bring out a question that Jeanette asked. Hi, Jeanette. Her question is for our young leaders here before you began your work, did you have any stereotypical ideas about older folk? And if so, what helped you to change your mind? Feel free to wave your hand if you want to answer. Or we’ll give Jeanette the award for stumping our panelists.
Jordan Bowman
I’ll just I’ll kick us off. I don’t think I don’t think I did. I think I’ve always felt really comfortable with older people. And it makes sense while I’m in this room, and in this role. There are there are the cliches that being older means being more conservative and more opposed to change. And I’ve had really good examples of older people who are constantly adapting, I have to give a shout out to my to my mom and dad who I think are in the crowd somewhere. My dad’s always been an early adopter of technology and always curious about what’s what’s changing and growing. And so part of my experience is based off of that, an elder now who’s who’s always interested in that creative process of what’s next, what’s new. And maybe it’s part of my personality to always see past the cliches. So I guess, is a non answer to your question. It’s an opposite answer your question, I didn’t have a specific one there.
Eunice Lin Nichols
I think something I heard in your comment, Jordan is also the importance of knowing more than one older person, you can’t not have a stereotype, if you have limited interaction. The beauty of cogenerational spaces, is you have a lot of data points that can show you something different. Dillon were you leaning in?
Dillon St. Bernard
Yeah, I was leaning in because I think, I was stumped at first and I’m like, it’s really been the evidence of working with other generations. I’m like, Oh, my God, please. You know, it wasn’t a top of mind. But I didn’t seek out, frankly, working in a cogenerational, leadership kind of environment, it kind of just happened because there was a curiosity on my end, there was a curiosity on the other end, and we were connected again by this shared vision. And as we were going into this deeper, we had the evidence that there was trust in there and that we were seeing what the our impact resulted in. So I think that is so much about just the power of building intentionally is that you can see this evidence and ideally, you can continue to build and trust each other as you go in this journey to again, build and sustain power.
Eunice Lin Nichols
Yeah, great. I’m gonna toss in another question because we don’t have much time left. And we’ve woven some in throughout. But this one I think is important. There have been a few panelists that want to know if you feel like young people are aware of earlier, progressive movements, the things that boomers did when they were younger to fight the good fight. I know Serena, you had mentioned Grace Lee Boggs, the role that she has played in terms of some of your thinking do you think young people have access to, to what came before? And if not, is that a problem? And how might we address that? Loren, is that a hand?
Serena Bian
I can jump in. And I feel like I’ll, I’ll answer. part of your question, Eunice, which is that I certainly can’t speak for all young people and how learned of history and context and culture we are. But another another question that I have to ascribe to the folks at The Boggs Center in the work of Jimmy and Grace Lee Boggs in Detroit is asking the question, “What time is it on the world’s clock?” What story are we in. And in order to understand this current story, it certainly requires looking back into history. And I think that’s actually a thing that all of us can do, no matter how much we know, or don’t know. And in particular, young people as well. And an organization that I’m so inspired by is called the National Council of Elders. And they’re a group of about 30, or 40, movement, elders born from the civil rights movements, who are now wanting to really support with the intergenerational wisdom, exchange and sharing of not just what they did, but also what they learned and what is relevant and needs to be continued to edit it and to be edited and refined for our modern days. So I think there’s just so many examples of, and more examples needed, I think of this type of exchange born and rooted in history.
Eunice Lin Nichols
Thank you, Serena. I’m gonna do a rapid fire. So only if you have a quick answer to this. If you if – some in our audience, are in a contentious relationship with somebody much older or younger than them, or are having a hard time having a conversation, do you have a tip for something they could do to just move the needle on that a little. Emily?
Emily Garcia-Green
Listen more, and be extremely curious about what the other person has to say. And really do your best to try to suspend judgment.
Eunice Lin Nichols
Love it. All right, I’m going to try and land our plane on time. We had so many good questions, so many good comments as well in the chat box and q&a, we will share out both recording and and possibly some of the comments that have had been put in the chat box, too, I hope you’ve taken some time to look at it. I just want to say that I have learned so much from you all from this cohort of young people, the 31, who participated in the study. These conversations have really inspired me and I think I can speak for Marc, to double down on our commitment to bring older and younger changemakers together. We often think about and talk about how the world’s challenges are too big for one generation to solve alone. Some of you have echoed that in your contributions today. I know when I was in my 20s, I didn’t want to do work with just other people in my 20s. I think I intuitively knew that that was both not going to bring in enough diversity of thought and I knew it would be less fun. So now that I’m nearing 50, and Mark is in his 60s, I think we both know, we don’t want to do this work with just folks in our 50s and 60s, we will not have the viewpoint diversity, and we know it will not be as fun. So if you and our audience have felt some glimmers of what it looks like or feels like to be actively, intentionally pursuing cogeneration, I invite you to join us and continuing to explore what it means to be an ally to today’s young people. To unleash the power of the “co” that we talked about in cogeneration. We believe it’s the only way forward that simultaneously leverages the sheer numbers, the demographics of olders and youngers in our society that are really ready to be a force for good as we’ve seen today, and leverages the fundamental human wiring we all have to connect with each other. So I want to end by encouraging people to read the report. If you haven’t, to share, I think somebody will share that link in the chat box. Let everyone know about it, share the link to this recording, have conversations and as Emily said, be good listeners, just suspend judgment and listen. And the last thing is we’re going to put up a quick poll here as we wrap up, so that we can hear whether or not you are inspired to include more older younger people in your life. And as you answer that, to give us a little feedback, I just want to formally thank Serena Dillon, Loren, Jordan, Emily, Jo Ann Jenkins, and Marc all of you for joining us today. I want to also thank AARP and the Eisner Foundation for making this work possible. We need to do so much more of this. And our hope and dream is that we will do a bookend study that looks at what older adults want from younger allies. So this was part one of much more work. This is not the end it is just the beginning. Grateful for you all. Thank you for joining us for an evening event that is meaningful that you took the time to be here with us. Good night.