The secret to happiness, longevity, and living on is through mentoring the next generation.

In How to Live Forever, Encore.org founder and CEO Marc Freedman tells the story of his thirty-year quest to answer some of contemporary life's most urgent questions: With so many living so much longer, what is the meaning of the increasing years beyond 50? How can a society with more older people than younger ones thrive? How do we find happiness when we know life is long and time is short?

In a poignant book that defies categorisation, Freedman finds insights by exploring purpose and generativity, digging into the drive for longevity and the perils of age segregation, and talking to social innovators across the globe bringing the generations together for mutual benefit. He finds wisdom in stories from young and old, featuring ordinary people and icons like jazz great Clark Terry and basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. But the answers also come from stories of Freedman's own mentors-a sawmill worker turned surrogate grandparent, a university administrator who served as Einstein's driver, a cabinet secretary who won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the gym teacher who was Freedman's father.

How to Live Forever is a deeply personal call to find fulfillment and happiness in our longer lives by connecting with the next generation and forging a legacy of love that lives beyond us.

The Kindness of Strangers tells the story of a group of concerned adults who mentor inner-city youth. It describes what volunteers can do to ameliorate the conditions of young people living in poverty. It chronicles the rise of the mentoring movement and examines its wider implications for education and social policy. Based on interviews with over 300 mentors, young people, scholars, and youth workers, The Kindness of Strangers takes a hard look at mentoring and asks some critical questions: How much can mentoring really accomplish? What does it take to be a successful mentor? What makes the difference between an effective program and one fraught with difficulties? Marc Freedman brings experience, research, and realism to these questions in an effort to present the truth about the mentoring movement sweeping America today. This revised edition contains a new introduction that highlights research that has been conducted since the original publication of the book in 1993. Marc Freedman is President of Civic Ventures, a research and development organization based in Berkeley, California. He has studied education and social policy for more than a decade and prior to starting Civic Ventures he was director of special projects for Public/Private Ventures, an organization focused on helping young people in poverty.

In How to Live Forever, social entrepreneur Marc Freedman argues that we don't need medical or scientific intervention to live forever. Instead of trying to be young, we can live forever (and save money) by being there for those who are young. Investing time with young people, mentoring, and passing wisdom from generation to generation, is truly living one's legacy. For the first time ever, we have more older people than young people, more people over 60 than under 20. In these new demographics we are more dependent than ever as societies on the flourishing of young people. Freedman will show how various innovations around the world are beginning to bring the generations together in ways that are mutually beneficial and suited to the realities of the 21st century. With insights from brain science, human development, and other research, he provides a blueprint for how societies can remain vital even as they age, and how to find great purpose and joy in the second half of life.

Marc Freedman, hailed by the New York Times as the voice of aging baby boomers [seeking] meaningful and sustaining work later in life," offers a recipe for how we can transform America's coming midlife crisis into a midlife opportunity. Millions of people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies are searching for answers to the question What's next?" and are navigating their way to an entirely new stage of life and work, one that could last as long as midlife. Shifting to a much longer lifespan isn't as easy as it may seem. Unlike the transition from adolescence to adulthood, managing this process for many is a do-it-yourself project. Drawing on powerful personal stories, The Big Shift provides not only direction but a vision of what it would take to help millions find their footing in a new map of life.

In one of the most significant social trends of the new century, and the biggest transformation of the American workforce since the women's movement, members of the baby boom generation are inventing a new phase of work. Encore tells the stories of encore career pioneers who are not content, or affluent enough, to spend their next thirty years on a golf course. These men and women are moving beyond midlife careers yet refusing to phase out or fade away. As they search for a calling in the second half of life and focus on what matters most, these individuals stand to transform the nature of work in America. They also hold the potential to create a society that balances the joys and responsibilities of contribution across the generations,in other words, one that works better for all of us.

Over the next three decades, the number of Americans over fifty will double, swelling to more than a quarter of the population. Already we are living thirty years longer than a century ago, with further gains expected in the coming years. The end result is a new stage of life, one as long or longer than childhood or middle age in duration, and one spent in unprecedented good health. Yet, as individuals, and as a society, we've shown little imagination or wisdom in using this great gift of a third age. Marc Freedman identifies the new longevity as not a problem to be solved, but an opportunity to be seized-provided we can engage the experience, talent, and idealism of older Americans. At a juncture when the middle-generation faces a time-famine, struggling to simultaneously raise kids and work long hours on the job, the older generation is awash in free time, poised to succeed women as the trustees of civic life in this country. In the process they stand to find new meaning and purpose in their lives, and abandon the limbo-like state unfulfilling for so many older individuals. Freedman argues that the aging phenomenon, the massive transformation that many portray as our downfall, may in fact be our best hope for renewal as a nation.