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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Stewart Brand

The Long Now Foundation
Purpose Prize Fellow 2006

Nurturing long-term thinking and long-term responsibility

Technology has brought breathtaking change to modern life, but it’s also left us with a collective attention span shrinking precipitously, and that, to Stewart Brand is a risk to civilization. Known for creating the Whole Earth Catalogue, Brand, 67, co-founded the Long Now Foundation in 1995 to develop a coherent and compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking and long-term responsibility. Here was a way, he thought, to consider otherwise intractable or invisible problems. The Foundation embraced several projects, including a 10,000-year clock inside a remote Nevada mountain; an online collection of the world’s living languages (the Rosetta Project); a publicly-available digital preservation and archiving project; and seminars focusing on long-term thinking. In 1997, Brand presented a BBC television series, “How Buildings Learn,” building on his book by the same title published three years earlier. and in 1999, wrote The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, a series of essays on long-term thinking. While hundreds have attended Long Now seminars, the Foundation’s greatest audience has been on the Web, where up to 30,000 people a month download the free audio recorded lectures.