About the Legacy Project:
Legacies Across Generations

Legacies are about life, living, and making a difference at all ages. They are about learning from the past, living in the present, and hoping for the future.

  

Goals of the Legacy Project

The Legacy Project is a national initiative under the Parenting Coalition and Generations United, both based in Washington, DC. It has been developed and is coordinated by The Communication Project. It has six key goals:

  

How the Legacy Project Began
and What It Is

The Legacy Project has been inspired by the hundreds of letters, calls, faxes, and e-mails received from children and adults across the country in response to the award-winning book Something to Remember Me By. This seemingly simple intergenerational story about special connections and legacies across generations prompts discussion and inspires both young and old to think about legacies in their own lives. Once you start thinking about legacies and intergenerational relationships, this kit (and the other Across Generations kits which are part of the project) takes you to the next step with plenty of ideas, information, and activities.

The Legacy Project offers a variety of activity theme kits throughout the year (Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Grandparents Day, and The Holidays). The activity kits are for use by schools, community groups, seniors groups/facilities, and families. There are also contests run throughout the year to focus attention on certain themes and activities, and a series of workshops at sites across the country.

Each activity theme kit is updated and expanded annually (activities are added, information and resources are updated, and we incorporate feedback and ideas from across the country). The latest information and the newest activity kit are always available at www.legacyproject.org. The website offers the free edition of each kit. There's a more complete, printed edition of each activity kit available through The Communication Project, along with the Legacy Project Binder which holds all the kits. Contact The Communication Project (1-800-772-7765 or tcp@tcpnow.com) for more information on the printed activity kit editions and binder, as well as book discounts available as part of the Legacy Project.

This Valentine's Activity Kit looks at mentoring and building real community for young and old. In keeping with the holiday, it also explores the power of love -- particularly love across generations. You'll find ideas on meaningful, loving gifts to give young and old, as well as information and activities on making a "heart to heart" intergenerational connection.

The Legacy Project Partners include The Communication Project, Parenting Coalition International, Generations United, Lane Furniture, Geezer.com, Books Are Fun (a Reader's Digest Company), Memory Makers magazine, MyFamily.com, and IBM.

  

The Meaning of Legacy

Since becoming National Chair of the Legacy Project, I have had to consistently correct one common misconception: legacies are not about death and dying. They are about exactly the opposite. They are about making the most of life and living. They are about making a difference that not only brings meaning to your own life, but extends beyond yourself and your own lifetime.

The Legacy Project explores legacies in the broadest sense. Exploring the idea of legacy offers a glimpse not only into human relationships, but also the human spirit. I believe legacy is fundamental to what it is to be human, and that a sense of legacy is largely what's missing today. Research shows that without a sense of working to create a legacy, adults lose meaning in their life.

The word "generativity" was coined in 1950 by psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. It is the second last stage of the eight stages into which he divided the human life cycle. He came up with the term because he felt words like "productivity" and "creativity" were too narrow to encompass all the ways we try to make our mark on the future. At its simplest level, generativity is about providing for succeeding generations. It's choosing to take an active interest in guiding the next generation. In its broadest sense, generativity is the desire to put your energy into things that will outlive you. It's a sense that your life is worthwhile and extends beyond yourself. Erikson called the life cycle itself "a system of generation and regeneration."

Erikson saw generativity as a stage of later life. More recently, researchers have treated it as a personality trait. In other words, the idea is that some people, no matter what their age, have more of it than others, or at least choose to be more conscious of it. Not everyone focuses on generativity. Those who don't tend to become absorbed in themselves. They may have gained material success, but find life boring and feel that something is missing, even though they're not certain what it is they long for. Neither education nor privilege seem to be connected with generativity, but successfully dealing with challenges faced earlier in life may. Women tend to score higher on measures of generativity, since they are still largely the kinkeepers in families.

People weren't very interested in Erikson's concept of generativity when he first proposed it. He was seemingly ahead of his time. With today's shifting demographics, we may now be ready. It is a rich and deep concept that has to do not only with nurturing the generations that follow us, but with creating legacies and leaving the world a bit better than we found it. In a time when so many people are searching for meaning, it's about creating something meaningful and lasting.

A meaningful, lasting legacy may take many forms -- children, grandchildren, a business, an ideal, a book, a home, some piece of yourself. At its core, a real legacy is that piece of yourself that makes a difference in the big puzzle of the universe. We all have a piece to contribute. It's up to us to fashion it and put it into place. It may be a big piece. It may be a small piece. But each piece matters.

Legacy also helps us find our way in the world and decide what we stand for. It can be a compass that guides us. It is based on values and character, and also a sense of responsibility to each other, the past, and the future.

  

Legacy and Community

We often think of legacy as a very personal, individual thing. It's not. Much of this kit explores legacy and its inextricable connection to community.

Said Albert Einstein:

Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: That we are here for the sake of others... for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day, I realize how much my outer and inner life is built upon the labors of people, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself to give in return as much as I have received.

Robert Ball, former US Social Security Commissioner, links legacy and community even more directly:

We owe much of what we are to the past. We all stand on the shoulders of generations that came before. They built the schools and established the ideals of an educated society. They wrote the books, developed the scientific ways of thinking, passed on ethical and spiritual values, discovered our country, developed it, won its freedom, held it together, cleared its forests and invented new technology.... Because we owe so much to the past, we have the obligation to try to pass on a world to the next generation which is a little better than the one we inherited so that those who come after, standing on our shoulders, can see a little further and do a little better in turn.

This is where the personal becomes political. Through legacy, "me" becomes "we" (and the irony is that "me" actually becomes more in the process). "We" encompasses past and future, old and young, and the society we create and perpetuate. "Society is indeed a contract," said Edmund Burke, a British writer and member of Parliament. "It becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."

Much of our sense of community and connectedness has been lost. In our highly individualistic society, we don't feel our destinies bound up with each other. We don't feel responsible to anything but ourselves in the here and now. By bringing together young and old, we may be able to start rebuilding our sense of community. All kinds of things are possible, from nursing homes with daycare centers to schools which offer learning opportunities for seniors and mentoring for students. When the national organization Generations United was formed in 1986, one of its creators, Jack Ossofsky, stated:

We believe that the time is long past when advocates for children, families, and the elderly can afford separate agendas. We foresee a new and brighter America when organizations like the Boy Scouts and the Older Women's League can join forces to strengthen our communities.

  

Mentor Me

Looking from the very start of your life at your entire life course is not an easy thing, but it is increasing critical. The world is a complex place. Today's young have important choices to make that have lifelong implications. Children actually have more choices, and more difficult choices, to make than their parents when they were young. Decisions are thrust upon them at earlier and earlier ages, and have serious and long-lasting consequences.

Most individuals who become "successful" (and that can be defined in any number of ways) usually have one or more people in their life that they greatly admire and who served as a model. Many people confronted with the randomness of existence have drawn hope from the knowledge that others before them have faced similar problems, and have been able to prevail. What today's young need are more mentors. Human development has been defined as the process by which an individual constructs a story of the world and acquires the tools to live in and with that story. But to develop that story and those tools, a child needs a support system that provides constant and mature feedback -- something that pop culture and immature peers simply cannot provide. Only parents, grandparents, teachers, and other adult mentors can provide that quality of support system.

At the beginning of life, we are what we are given. By mid-life, as we make our way in the world, we come to understand that we can be what we have been given and what we can create. Toward the end of life, we must understand that we must give to others, so that when we leave this world we are what we have been given, have created, and have passed on.

Research has shown that older adults make particularly good mentors, perhaps because of the stage of life they've reached, the fact that they tend to be more relationship-oriented rather than goal-focussed, and their greater life experience and patience. Through a grandparent or other older adult mentor, a young person can know the end of life at the beginning. Older people have experienced something younger people cannot: a personal sense of the entire life course. Older adults can give the young a first-hand look at the whole life cycle -- what it means to grow up, to develop certain life skills, to struggle with life's challenges, to complete life's major tasks, and to grow old.

In practical terms, mentoring today is about helping children, particularly those who are disadvantaged, learn to make critical, life-determining decisions. A mentor may assume many roles -- teacher/trainer; positive role model; nurturer; supporter, guide, and advocate; challenger; and friend/companion. Mentoring is about helping the young enhance their own lives. With the aging population, it's also about giving older adults a meaningful role in society. The mentoring relationship is a mutual one. Often the mentor learns as much as the mentee. Says the Talmud: "I have learned many things from my teachers; I have learned many things from my friends; and I have learned even more from my students."

  

Connection is Complicated

This activity kit explores two distinct but interrelated kinds of connection: love and community.

Real love is about genuinely caring for someone else and feeling cared about. Really good, loving relationships don't just happen. They require simple, hard work. They involve commitment, sacrifice, and reciprocity, with people giving and taking at different times. Love is an attitude backed up with appropriate behavior. It requires a certain amount of wisdom and honesty. A loving relationship is one that evolves. And that's why real love takes time.

We share our lives not only with those we love, like our family, but also with our neighbors, who we do not really "love." We may really love a dozen people or so. Which leaves somewhere in the neighborhood of six billion other people on the planet with whom we must interact, and hopefully get along. For them, we need the sense of responsibility that defines community. An ideal community gives its members a sense of identity and belonging, a sense of connectedness to something bigger, a measure of security, a framework of shared values, a network of caring individuals, and the experience of being needed. In a caring community, people depend on each other and take responsibility for each other. Communities at their best are interactive. Individuals give to the community, and the community supports the individual. Like maintaining a loving relationship, building community is hard work.

Connection of any sort requires choices. In family and in community, we accumulate obligations and commitments to other people as we go through life. The dilemma is that in order for community (and family) to thrive, individuals must willingly sacrifice some of their free will to the collective good. Group needs and expectations inevitably place limits on how we can express ourselves. We have a yearning for the exercise of who we are as individuals and a yearning for belonging, connection, and inclusion. There is constant tension throughout our lives between these forces of differentiation and connection, between individual desires and group expectations. And so we must make choices.

  

Community and Self

Oprah supposedly summed it all up at the beginning of one of her recent shows: "What we are trying to change in this one hour is what I think is at the root of all the problems in the world -- lack of self-esteem." So that's what it all comes down to? Individual feelings of inferiority?

We live in an excessively individualistic culture. While North Americans have historically been individualistic, we have moved far beyond simple individualism to the worship of self. On top of that, everything is measured by a simplistic, pop psychology yardstick. Self-help books promise nothing less than the fast, cheap, and easy release of human potential. Problems that were once considered economic, political, or educational are now deemed psychological. This has blinded us to underlying economic and political realities. In a society plagued by divisions of race, class, gender, and age, we are all otherwise occupied in the pursuit of our individual happiness and well-being.

Happiness is fine and good. But it's not everything. We have an overcommitment to the self and an undercommitment to the common. Today, the five hundred richest people on the planet control more wealth than the bottom three billion people, half of the human population. Does this sound like a psychological problem to you? Perhaps people hide and focus on the self because they feel helpless. They need to know that they can make a difference, that it can be better and that we as citizens can help make it so.

We as human beings are many things. We are inquirers, looking for an understanding of ourselves and the universe in which we live. We are moral agents, trying to discern, do, and defend what we consider to be the right thing. We are consumers and dwellers, involved in a daily round of living, eating, sleeping, and existing. We are workers, engaging in the labor that makes the consuming and dwelling possible. We are cultural beings, who take in the creations of the people around us. And we are connectors, reaching out to the people closest to us to forge bonds of varying kinds. But behind all of this is politics -- whether we like to admit it or not. This is because other people and the society in which we live determine, to a greater or lesser degree, our success in any of the other spheres of our life. Politics pervades human life, from the workplace to exchanges on the street. By ignoring or abdicating our duties as citizens, we surrender the field to the ambitious and the immoral. We actually give others more power over us even as we're trying to regain more control over our own lives. The control is illusionary. Without a strong notion of commitment to other people and our shared undertakings, without a sense that together we are creating a just world (a world not ruled by cheap acceptance of inevitability or the easy superiority of wealth or power), our hard-won individualism loses its deeper significance. It becomes personal comfort bereft of meaning.

Community is about the state of the world, the state of our souls, the state of our role as citizens, and the legacies we will leave those who come after us. Every human being is called on to participate in the making of society. It is a process of continuous creation which cannot continue unless we participate. We don't need citizenship based on blood, belief, patriotism, or law. We need citizenship based on participation. Yes, it may all seem overwhelming and hopeless. But it can be even more draining to bury your anger, convince yourself you're powerless, and swallow whatever is handed to you. When you get involved in community, you make your life count. What you do does make a difference. You create a vital legacy.

None of us has the final answers to the difficult questions this world faces. But as you listen to wide-ranging conversation, answers begin to become clearer. And as you participate, actions become easier. We need to extend the self beyond the individual. The illusion of the individual as omnipotent -- able to "take care of myself," live in a secured care-free condo, purchase home-delivered meals, buy any service, conduct work on a personal computer, and find distraction in a home entertainment center -- leads to the rupture of community. But if you view life in terms of a bigger picture, your responsibility is extended beyond yourself to include people in your family, people in your community, as well as future and historic people.

  

Building the Future
While Remembering the Past

Cynicism or hope -- which do you choose? This is the choice we all face, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, nations, and members of a species whose very long-term survival may be in question. Do we focus on the horrors human beings are capable of, or the courage and compassion that they have also so often exhibited? Both are equally real. By deciding what part of history we want to emphasize, we also decide what kind of community we want to be a part of.

Says Elie Wiesel in Conversations With Elie Wiesel:

When I went to Bosnia, I visited a prison camp. Then I understood why I remained so troubled and depressed. Not only because I saw suffering, imprisonment, victimization. That is enough to make you feel depressed. But also because I realized that in that tormented land, it is memory that is a problem. It's because they remember what happened to their parents or their sisters or their grandparents that they hate each other. But the reverse is also true. I believe in the redemptive quality of memory. I always try to say it's because we remember that we can be saved from further punishment... I believe that if we remember what human beings have done to other human beings, we can prevent other tragedies from occurring tomorrow... Whatever we do, we must remember there is a context. There are certain words that preceded my own, certain gestures that preceded my own. There are certain adventures that preceded mine. I am a result of who knows how many generations of fathers and mothers.

As you honor the past, you must also live and hope in the present and work to prepare others to follow you so that you can pass the baton when the time is right. Hope isn't something just for the young. Hope is something that adults, even as they are challenged by the disappointments of life, must hold on to. Writes poet Samuel Ullman, "People grow old by deserting their ideals. Years may wrinkle our skin, but to give up our enthusiasm wrinkles the soul."

We are all caught up in cynicism, and yet desperate for hope. So let's change it. That's part of what the Legacy Project is all about. Wise people recognize their own limitations and the limitations of life. But they also see possibilities and hope.

We are all, young and old, part of a larger community, a community that must remember its history to build its future. Community exists before you are born and remains after you are gone. Each part of your life, from childhood to adulthood to older adulthood, has a part in taking in or passing on the lessons of the past in order to create a better future.

The Berlin Wall didn't fall by itself. People dismantled it, over years of work, both politically and physically. In Soul of a Citizen, Paul Rogat Loeb writes about how we need to cultivate a sense of history and connection across generations to build community and effect real change:

If we see our political efforts as isolated acts, we're almost certainly going to grow desperate and disheartened. By contrast, viewing them as part of an ongoing historical narrative helps us feel we have all the time we need to act, even given the urgencies of the moment. It lets us concentrate on the work we have at hand, and trust that if we follow our most generous impulses, our labors will bear fruit. It shifts us from thinking solely about current crises, to asking how our efforts can best shape the world for generations to come.

To build community, to get socially involved, you need courage. Says Maya Angelou, "Courage may be the most important of all virtues, because without it one cannot practice any other virtue with consistency." Courage is what it takes to love, inspire, support, guide, and lead. Courage involves pursuing a fulfilling and productive life while at the same time holding the common good as the greatest good. It involves being able to face criticisms from those who will call your efforts fruitless, foolish, or a waste of scarce time. Participation in public life often requires you to confront greed and bigotry, blindness and shortsightedness, and even authoritarianism. It is often demanding, lonely, and frustrating. You set yourself up for heartbreak. There's usually no one cheering you on, no TV talk show you can tune into to make yourself feel better. Successes do not come easily or instantly. But knowing it's not supposed to be easy may make it easier. You realize that even if you experience setbacks and make mistakes while you're doing something, that's not as big as the mistake you'd be making if you were doing nothing.

  

The Legacy Project Revisited

The Legacy Project explores legacy from the perspective of "me" and "we." It looks at life, love, connection, community, wisdom, hope, today, yesterday, and tomorrow.

I enjoy working on this project. I get to put bits and pieces together that don't normally get put together. I think we need more "putting together" in our society. There are too many isolated pieces, just as there is too much emphasis on the individual over the well-being of the collective.

We desperately need to feel connected to something bigger -- to the bigger picture, to each other, and to the flow of life, the past and the future. A sense of connection helps us understand where we've come from, who we are, where we're going, and why we're going there. In connection there is contentment, purpose, and meaning. The world isn't connected by molecules. It is connected by stories, memories, hopes, and dreams. We are connected by the legacies passed down from those who came before us and the legacies we pass down to those who come after us. For both young and old, the power of legacy enables us to live fully in the present. You understand that you are part of a larger community, a community that must remember its history to build its future. There is caring combined with conscience. There is also wisdom to be found in each other -- linking action and reflection to deal with complex problems.

This project is about bringing all generations together to explore issues. It's about bringing together diverse groups -- families, schools, seniors groups, community groups, corporations, local and national organizations -- in a way they haven't been brought together before. It's about uniting research and grassroots concerns. It's about synthesizing information into a useful knowledge base. It's about creating momentum in an area that affects all our lives at the most fundamental level possible.

There are times when I get tired, frustrated, even angry. Even when it's not easy, I choose to choose hope over despair. It's what gets me out of bed every morning. I hope it's what gets you out of bed too.

Come watch the sunrise with me.