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...
Purpose Prize
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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....
Reinventing the American University for a Multigenerational Future
In an episode of this season of Hacks, the Emmy-winning intergenerational comedy, the older comedian Deborah Vance returns to her alma mater (UC Berkeley) to receive an honorary degree. Shortly after arriving, a video containing offensive jokes she delivered early in...
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Haywood Fennell, Sr.
Purpose Prize Fellow 2007
Promoting literacy through positive self-image.
For Haywood Fennell, Sr. 66, the turn-around came a little over 12 years ago. The former Vietnam Era vet had been in and out of jails and prisons, on and off drugs. After his final stay at a VA detox facility Fennell resided in a homeless shelter for 18 months and began to write his first play, which he produced while living at the shelter entitled, “Harlem Renaissance Revisited with a Boston Flavor.’ The play’s cast includes community leaders and elected officials working with youth as a generational cast in a play that talks about not giving up, triumphs over adversity. He has gone on to found the Oscar Micheaux Theater program and has collaborated with other community-based youth theater programs stage his productions and theirs for nine straight years. Haywood is now developing a literacy enhancement pilot project that can be replicated to spark and interest in reading and writing a well as to assist in abating the spiraling literacy plunge. He wrote and self-published “Coota and the Magic Quilt” that has been read by over 3,000 youth and educators and more recently translated into Spanish. He self-published the second book, in a planned Coota Trilogy entitled “Coota and the Challenge”. Both books deal with the growing up experiences and dynamics of a young African American boy in the inner City of Boston.