We specialize in the areas of human communication, literacy, science education, family, intergenerational relationships, life course, and lifelong learning. Our major education initiative is the Legacy Project, a big picture project that explores creating your life, connecting with others, and changing the world.

Our applied research work synthesizes current academic research with practical, grassroots concerns. We see learning as a lifelong process and run workshops for children, teens, young adults, baby boomers, and older adults with organizations, community groups, schools, and families. The books we publish are created and crafted with a commitment to quality, and supported through our other activities and programs. Following on the words of Ezra Pound, we believe "a book should be a ball of light in one's hand."

Some other thoughts that guide us and that you may find interesting...

"A newborn infant babbles, gurgles, wriggles, and reaches out to touch the world. Each day of life commemorates that very first day. Each day you and I reach out to our surroundings and wonder. We are human and we are wonderers."
Joe Abruscato

"It isn't exactly that we humans are made of words. But we are made of what we can make with words – ideas, images, hopes, theories, fears, plans, understandings, expectations, love, a past and a future, culture, ways of seeing, civilizations, minds – everything human. We are at once the source and the product of how we comprehend the world, and of how we express ourselves in it."
Lee Thayer

"I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand. Why shells existed on the tops of mountains along with the imprints of coral and plants and seaweed usually found in the sea. Why the thunder lasts a longer time than that which causes it and why immediately on its creation the lightning becomes visible to the eye while thunder requires time to travel. How the various circles of water form around the spot which has been struck by a stone and why a bird sustains itself in the air. These questions and other strange phenomena engaged my thought throughout my life."
Leonardo da Vinci

"You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others."
Robert Louis Stevenson

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
Mohandas Gandhi

"The critical responsibility for the generation you're in is to help provide the shoulders, the direction, and the support for those generations who come behind."
Gloria Dean Randle Scott

"Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!"
Rear Admiral David G. Farragut

"Hitch your wagon to a star."
Ralph Waldo Emerson