Media coverage of social isolation and loneliness is focused almost exclusively on the problem. With barely a whisper about solutions, you’d be forgiven for thinking nobody is working on answers. So when we opened applications for a five-week community of practice to...
Purpose Prize
The Latest from CoGenerate
Event Recording: Youth Power — What can teens teach us about cogeneration?
https://youtu.be/AdHsLrBxjoI At Citizen University, both teens and adults are deeply involved in strengthening civic culture. But when all ages met, both young and older were a bit uneasy. They wondered how they could best work together. How could they tap the talents...
5 Ways to Make Your Collaboration with Teens a Success
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...
*
Ted Wohlfarth
Purpose Prize Fellow 2009
Using games he invented, Wohlfarth is fostering understanding among children of different faiths by encouraging them to bring out the best in each other.
Ted Wohlfarth spent the first half of his life teaching economics, studying commercial real estate markets, and coaching his children’s baseball, basketball, and soccer teams. Those experiences taught Wohlfarth there is a problem with the games that adults give children because most games create the impression that the only way to win is for someone to lose. This recognition led Wohlfarth to invent games that keep score a new way — based on economic game theory to keep score of cooperative performance. In 1995, Wohlfarth founded EnTeam Organization to bring those games, which measure cooperation on both the athletic field and in the classroom, to children in his St. Louis community. Shortly after September 11, 2001, Wohlfarth created Operation Cooperation, a program designed to bring together Muslim, Jewish, and Christian students, teachers, and parents from four St. Louis elementary schools and create social understanding by using EnTeam activities. “I felt that teaching children that they can win by working with the ‘other side’ was the key to making a more productive and peaceful world,” says Wohlfarth, 62. Operation Cooperation has served more than 900 students, teachers, and parents. At the urging of school administrators and teachers, Wohlfarth developed a high school version of Operation Cooperation and began a pilot program in January 2009. Now, Wohlfarth is working to expand Operation Cooperation to other cities.