To Break Down Age Silos, the Eisner Foundation Seeks Intergenerational Innovators

Oksana Klymenko/shutterstock

Most of us are aware of this startling fact: Our nation and our world are aging. People over 65 are expected to outnumber those under 18 in the U.S. by 2035. Yet despite growing numbers of older folks, younger people don’t necessarily interact with them in their daily lives. We tend to live in “age silos.” Older people are often home alone or in a retirement community while younger folks are pounding kombucha at an urban coffee shop with other youthful remote workers. This age segregation contributes to the epidemic of loneliness people of all ages face.

A number of foundations have begun working to bring people together, including the Eisner Foundation, the leading funder in this space. The latest news from Eisner: Applications are open for its 2024/2025 Eisner Prize Fellowship. Between three and five up-and-coming innovators in intergenerational connection will each get a $10,000 fellowship and a $40,000 grant to help with a new program focused on bringing youngsters and oldsters together for the mutual benefit of everyone. Interested individuals can apply through May 22 on the foundation’s website.

This is the foundation’s second year offering this fellowship, but it comes on the heels of more than a decade of using a prize to spur excitement around intergenerational work. From 2011 through 2022, the Eisner Foundation awarded the slightly different Eisner Prize for Intergenerational Excellence, which was for “organizations doing exceptional intergenerational work across the United States.” That evolved in 2023 into the current award, which focuses specifically on “emerging intergenerational leaders” and includes a special call for young people, people of color and those working with historically marginalized communities. 

Emerging intergenerational leaders have some novel ideas for bringing the generations together. Last year’s winner, Kenna Embree, created Fur-Ever Friends, a project using foster animal care to connect older residents of the Vincentian retirement homes in Pennsylvania with the handful of college kids who also live there (part of Vincentian’s own intergenerational attempt). Meanwhile, fellow Marvell Adams Jr. used his money to create a replicable, scalable model of intergenerational living in communities surrounding HBCUs. While there are more than 100 older adult communities affiliated with universities, none of these are connected to the 100+ HBCUs in the country. (Read more about last year’s winners here.)

Becoming an intergenerational funder 

Michael D. Eisner, then-chair and CEO of the Walt Disney Company, and his wife, Jane, founded the Eisner Foundation in 1996. It originally funded nonprofits focused on children, but over the years, the Eisners grew increasingly interested in the power of intergenerational programming to solve some of society’s toughest problems — not only because of the nation’s changing demographics but also due to the growing intergenerational nature of their own family, with three sons who are also now involved in the family foundation, and nine grandchildren. 

When the Eisners hired nonprofit professional Trent Stamp as CEO in 2008, he pressed them to think harder about their grantmaking. As he told me, “I asked the question: ‘Why are we giving to kids? Is it because kids are cute, or because they often lack access and power?’ If the answer is the latter, maybe we should add seniors, too, because they are also vulnerable people.” 

For all of these reasons, the Eisner Foundation moved all of its funding to intergenerational work in 2015, becoming the only foundation focused exclusively on the area. That means the philanthrosphere has had nearly a decade with a high-profile, prolific funder supporting and proselytizing about the power of intergenerational programming. Have other foundations operating in the still-small aging space followed Eisner and routed more money to nonprofits and individuals bringing people together? 

Yes and no. 

Multigenerational mixing is trending 

While we may live in age silos, most people would prefer to live in something more like an age-integrated square dance. As this fact-sheet from the nonprofit Generations United put it, 8 of 10 adults say they want to spend time with people from other generations. Also from Generations United: “Intergenerational programs are meaningful, important and fun — and they are booming across the U.S. and around the world.”

On the for-profit side, companies and the consultants who serve them increasingly stress the importance of age integration, too. As this infographic by AARP shows, some 83% of global execs “recognize that a multigenerational workforce is key to business growth and success.” The Harvard Business Review offers tips for bringing generations together in the pursuit of a better bottom line. 

Intergenerational housing, another hot topic, “is associated with better health outcomes, lower poverty levels, and can lead to cost-savings on items like rent,” AARP’s Director of Housing and Livable Communities Shannon Guzman said in an interview last year. A 2019 meta-study of intergenerational programs published in the European Journal of Ageing reported, “Overall, these programs seem to have benefits for both generations, improving the functioning and quality of life of the older people and changing children’s stereotyped views of older people.” 

Still more talk than action from philanthropy

Ideas and projects like these are distinctive and exciting, but often small-scale, as is the overall amount of philanthropic support that goes to intergenerational work. The Eisner Foundation, which gives an estimated $8 to 10 million per year to nonprofits in Los Angeles County and New York City, remains the only U.S.-based foundation solely focused on intergenerational programs. Other funders do contribute, however. Generations United, for example, has support not only from Eisner but also from more than a dozen other funders, including Ballmer Group, Annie E. Casey Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. 

The Austin-based St. David’s Foundation, originally an aging-focused funder, has increasingly used intergenerational work as a way to meet its aims. St. David's took inspiration from a provider of affordable intergenerational housing called Bridge Meadows, as I’ve written before. Bridge Meadows, in turn, has support from a variety of funders including Bank of America Charitable Foundation, Collins Foundation, Seattle Foundation, May & Stanley Smith Charitable Trust, Walsh Construction, and Harry & Jeanette Weinberg Foundation.

The Ares Charitable Foundation, meanwhile, gave $700,000 to the nonprofit CoGenerate in 2023, which the nonprofit then awarded to 10 winners of that year’s CoGen Challenge. As with these other foundations, Ares’ CoGen funding came out of an awareness that intergenerational programming could support its main mission as an alternative to a separate program for intergenerational grantmaking. 

Stamp said this one-toe-in-the-water approach to intergenerational funding can be how change starts. “Right now, other foundations supporting intergenerational programs are usually coming to this work through existing priorities around youth or aging, particularly aging. But that’s part of how we came to the work, as well, and it took us a while to get to our fully intergenerational focus. So we have hope that in the years to come, more foundations will fully embrace an emphasis on bringing generations together to solve a wide range of challenges.”

The funding from Eisner for this next round of fellows, and the visibility of the grantees themselves, will hopefully further that cause.