Purpose Prize

Marc Freedman Portrait

The Latest from CoGenerate

New Survey Reveals Benefits of Older-Younger Tutoring Teams

New Survey Reveals Benefits of Older-Younger Tutoring Teams

For the past year, Ampact, with support from CoGenerate’s Generations Serving Together program, placed cogenerational pairs of AmeriCorps members in elementary schools. The older and younger adults worked side by side to improve students’ reading and math skills. A...

The Billionaire Who Gave Away His Fortune Took a Big Chance on Us

The Billionaire Who Gave Away His Fortune Took a Big Chance on Us

We at CoGenerate (formerly Encore.org) are mourning the loss of Chuck Feeney this week. Without Chuck's vision and generosity we likely would not exist as an organization. Twenty-five years ago Atlantic Philanthropies took a chance on our start-up, playing a...

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Kathy Eldon

Creative Visions Foundation
Purpose Prize Fellow 2008

Supporting “creative activists” who use media to transform the world around them.

Kathy Eldon’s work was born out of loss. Her son, Dan, a photojournalist on assignment in Somalia, was stoned to death by an angry mob in 1993. He was just 22. As a teenager, Dan had helped support a Masai family and led a group of international teens to deliver funds for wells for Malawi refugees. After his death, Kathy Eldon, a journalist and film producer, published Dan’s personal journals in the book, The Journey Is the Destination, to show the “power of one.” Eldon saw that film and other media could foster social change. To honor her son’s memory, Eldon launched Creative Visions Foundation in 1998. It funds and supports “creative activists” who use media and the arts to draw attention to humanitarian, social and environmental issues and inspire positive change. The foundation has helped launch and support more than 40 projects and productions, including Video Volunteers, now the largest producer of community videos in India; The Name Campaign, which uses media to draw attention to the plight of child soldiers in Uganda, and the multi-award winning Abduction, a film about Japanese youth kidnapped into North Korea. “One of the largest challenges facing America is a growing population that is unaware of what’s going on in the world and – worse yet – is apathetic about the issues. We believe that if informed, Americans would wish to become involved in creating positive change.”