Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.

Want to connect across generations? Join us:

Purpose Prize

Marc Freedman Portrait

The Latest from CoGenerate

Harnessing the Power of Cogeneration on Campus

Harnessing the Power of Cogeneration on Campus

We’re excited to announce the next phase of Campus CoGenerate! With support from MetLife Foundation, Campus Compact and CoGenerate will expand efforts to make campuses centers for cogenerational collaboration and learning, and to bring generations together to secure a...

New! Tools, activities, case studies, guides, research & more!

New! Tools, activities, case studies, guides, research & more!

Looking to create meaningful connections across generations but need some ideas and activities to get you started? We’ve got you covered.  Our new Resources page is packed with practical tools, activities, research, case studies, and expert guidance to help you...

*

Lois Steinberg

SOS Medicare
Purpose Prize Fellow 2006

Mobilizing older adults to provide health care benefits counseling and information

As a sociologist, Lois Steinberg, 79, did research on school advocacy groups in the 1960s, and discovered that parents had to organize underground networks in order to get schools to address their children’s needs. While earning a master’s degree in health advocacy in her 70s, Steinberg began to suspect that peer networks might also be an efficient way to tackle health illiteracy among older people. So in 2001, she created SOS Medicare (Seniors Speaking Out) with the Medicare Rights Center. The goal: to mobilize older volunteers in Westchester County, New York to provide health care counseling and information on their health rights and benefits to middle- and lower-income older adults in senior centers, clubs, and religious institutions. The organization’s outreach expanded when the Medicare Prescription Drug benefit was introduced in 2006. SOS volunteers now present forums on the subject and offer one-on-one counseling to help people select a prescription drug plan. Steinberg’s next undertaking is to develop a program to provide assertiveness training and advocacy tools to older adults and their adult children, so that they can be advocates for their own health care, and for those they care about.