Purpose Prize

Marc Freedman Portrait

The Latest from CoGenerate

Want to Recruit Younger People? Look Within

Want to Recruit Younger People? Look Within

20-year-old Denise Webb (pictured above) is a CoGenerate Senior Fellow. She’s a student at Berry College and a seasoned activist, working with organizations including United Way, Partnership for Southern Equity and The Sunrise Movement. She is the co-author of Why...

What Young Leaders Want — And Don’t Want — From Older Allies

What Young Leaders Want — And Don’t Want — From Older Allies

We know from our nationally representative study with NORC at the University of Chicago in 2022 that 76% of Gen Z and 70% of Millennial respondents wish they had more opportunities to work across generations for change.  In a new report, What Young Leaders Want — And...

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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.