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5 Ways to Make Your Collaboration with Teens a Success

5 Ways to Make Your Collaboration with Teens a Success

Our task, as we understood it, was to get teen leaders involved in Citizen University’s Youth Collaboratory excited about working alongside adults to create change — what we call cogeneration. As it turns out, teens in the program were already excited about...

Want to Jumpstart a Conversation About Collaborating With Teens?

Want to Jumpstart a Conversation About Collaborating With Teens?

When CoGenerate and Citizen University launched a project to deepen cogenerational ties, our goal was to get teens excited about working alongside older adults to create change.  What we discovered surprised us. Teens didn’t need convincing to work across generations....

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David Schwartz

The Eldercare Companies, Inc.
Purpose Prize Fellow 2006

After his mother died of fall-related injuries, former state legislator David Schwartz, 67, became passionate about preventing geriatric falls and founded ElderCare Companies.

After his mother died of fall-related injuries, former state legislator David Schwartz, 67, became passionate about preventing geriatric falls and founded ElderCare Companies.The organization’s goal is to reduce the incidence, severity, and costs of geriatric falls in all 50 states. Eleven million older Americans fall every year with 1.8 million sustaining serious injuries. To reduce that number, Schwartz created a fall prevention program that provides counseling about fall risks, conducts group workshops, distributes monthly reminders of preventative measures, and develops a support system tool that disseminates risk reports to an elder’s family, friends, doctors, and pharmacists.In a recent project in South Florida, ElderCare was able to reduce hospitalizations for falls by more than 50 percent and nursing home admissions by 65 percent among 6,000 low-income elders. Projects in New York and Philadelphia yielded similar results. ElderCare will expand to ten more states over the next few years, and Schwartz is negotiating with HMOs to adopt the program.