Of benches, elders, and the intergenerational reach for wisdom

My journey as a serial social entrepreneur has always been guided by a simple but persistent question: what truly matters in building healthier, more connected societies? Over time, that question has led me to focus not only on intervention or on innovation, but on inclusion, particularly the inclusion of those whose voices are too often overlooked. This path ultimately brought me to the Elders Council for Social Entrepreneurs and to initiatives such as the Friendship Bench, both of which carry a powerful idea: that elders are not passive recipients of care, but active agents of change in their own journeys and in the wellbeing of others.

This direction was shaped very early in my life. In 1969, at the age of 22, together with my young wife, I witnessed something that has stayed with me ever since. We were celebrating the news of our first pregnancy and were walking away from the laboratory of a big public hospital in Malawi, where the staff had kindly confirmed our good news, when suddenly we came upon a cage. Inside were people suffering from mental illness. They were ostracised by their community and, most disturbingly, tormented by children who would provoke and mock them, poking them with large sticks.

It was a deeply unsettling scene, but it revealed something fundamental: the profound stigma surrounding mental health and the urgent need to address it. From that moment, a sense of purpose took hold. I found myself drawn to those at the margins, to places and people often overlooked, and committed to finding ways to bring dignity, understanding, and inclusion into their lives.

In the years that followed, this commitment began to take organisational form. In the early 2000s, I founded BasicNeeds to focus specifically on mental health and development in low-income settings. Before that, however, I had cut my teeth on founding two organisations which continue to do important work today: Thrive and ADD International. Each, in different ways, reinforced my belief that change happens when people who are too often excluded are given the means to shape their own futures.

This instinct to go where others do not, and to listen where others may not hear, has remained a constant thread in my work. Equally, I came to understand that health delivery is not solely about medicine, important though medicine undoubtedly is, but about a whole-life approach. In the case of Thrive, for example, the restorative power of horticulture and gardening offers what one might call a balm: a way of rebuilding wellbeing through connection to nature and purposeful activity. It is notable that doctors today increasingly turn to social prescribing, recommending gardening and similar practices as part of a wider approach to health. In the case of ADD International, the emphasis is different, but complementary, asserting the rights of disabled people by supporting them to form their own organisations and to champion their own voices. In both instances, the lesson is clear: health and wellbeing are rooted not only in treatment, but in dignity, participation, and belonging.

I have recently been working with several friends, Paloma Ruiz, Andrea Coleman, and Katelynne Kirk, on the development of the Friendship Bench for the Skoll World Forum (SWF). Our focus was the community of social innovators at the heart of the Forum, and this work was carried out through the Elders Council for Social Entrepreneurs, whose primary aim is to support that community. To ensure that social entrepreneurs are supported with truly useful resources, we developed Insight, a rich collection of podcasts, webinars, and articles spanning four core themes: Success and Transition, Leadership, Money, and Wellbeing. Yet we always feel the need to go further and offer something immediate, practical, and human.

With the support of the Skoll Foundation and the Friendship Bench Zimbabwe, we introduced a simple but powerful intervention: benches staffed by experienced social innovators who were ready to sit, listen, and engage in confidential conversations. Almost as soon as the benches were in place, people came forward, each carrying something they wished to share or work through. The concept itself is beautifully straightforward. Ashoka Fellow Dr. Dixon Chibanda, the innovative psychiatrist behind the Friendship Bench Zimbabwe, observed that grandmothers in rural communities would often sit on benches near their homes, becoming natural points of contact for others seeking guidance, comfort, or simply someone to listen. What we did through the Elders Council for Social Entrepreneurs was to adapt and translate this deeply human, community-rooted practice into a new context…retaining its essence while making it accessible to a global network of changemakers. In order to enhance this, we presented two benches: one in English and one in Spanish.

This experience brings into focus a broader and more urgent reality. Those of us in the postwar generation, the baby boomer generation, have, overall, benefited from rising prosperity, expanding public services, and an expectation that life would improve over time. However, there is a growing recognition that younger generations are not enjoying these economic and social advantages. We find ourselves at a time, when progress can no longer be taken for granted. Yet at the same time, younger generations are facing a significant mental health crisis, with the most striking element in the data being the sheer scale and speed of deterioration: over 1.2 million children and young people in England are now in contact with NHS mental health services, a record figure that has risen far faster than the system’s ability to respond.

This sits alongside evidence that the severity and complexity of young people’s needs are increasing, while access to timely care is shrinking. Globally, the WHO reports that most countries still lack adequate youth mental health provision, meaning this is not a localised issue but a worldwide pattern of rising distress and insufficient support. The combination of escalating demand, worsening symptoms, and chronically under-resourced services is what makes today’s youth mental health crisis so stark.

At the same time, generations have become increasingly disconnected. We are more physically and socially isolated than in the past; living apart, working apart, and rarely occupying shared spaces where meaningful intergenerational exchanges can take place. In losing these connections, we also lose access to a vital source of resilience, perspective, and care. In short, we are losing a sense of community.

Reintegrating elders as changemakers is therefore not simply an act of respect; it is a practical necessity. Here, I adopt the word “elder” not as a term for all older people, but for those with a special ability to hold a respectful space for others to learn from the wisdom they have acquired, and an openness to learn from younger generations. Elders in the community bring lived experience. They have navigated upheaval, scarcity, and change. Initiatives like the Friendship Bench demonstrate how this wisdom can be mobilised, positioning elders not just as recipients of care but as providers of it. Through listening, empathy, and presence, they help restore the social fabric that underpins collective wellbeing.

The wisdom economy is the stage beyond the knowledge economy. It is where societies recognise that information alone is not enough. What matters is the ability to interpret, integrate, and apply knowledge with judgement, ethics, and lived experience. In a wisdom economy, value is created not by data or expertise on their own, but by the human capacity to make sense of complexity, to act with foresight, and to strengthen the social fabric. The wisdom economy places real value on intergenerational learning, collective problem solving, and long-term thinking. These qualities are indispensable for good mental health. Unlike many areas of health, where technical knowledge alone can drive solutions, mental health depends on context, culture, and lived experience just as much as clinical expertise. It is precisely this blend of insight, judgement, and human understanding that the wisdom economy elevates, and it is why it offers such a powerful frame for addressing today’s youth mental health crisis.

Within this, elders hold a uniquely important place. They carry the long view, the memory of what communities have survived, the patterns that repeat, and the quiet knowledge of what helps people endure. In a moment when young people face rising levels of distress, elders provide not only perspective but also steadiness, relational depth, and a form of care that cannot be automated or professionalised. Their presence anchors the wisdom economy: they help societies remember what matters, interpret complexity, and pass on the emotional and cultural resources that young people need to thrive. This has been the role of elders over the centuries, but in recent times, we have seen this degrade through the lack of relational community that I have talked about.

At the same time, we must acknowledge the weight of intergenerational trauma. I am not being romantic here, for many elders were never given the language or the support to process their own distress; their resilience was forged in silence, and this kind of silence does not vanish. It passes down as trauma. Any honest account of intergenerational repair has to hold both truths at once: that elders carry wisdom worth mobilising, and that they carry wounds worth tending.

In carrying on this analysis, it is equally important not to cast young people solely as recipients of inherited trauma. This would be too simplistic. While intergenerational wounds can shape their starting point, younger generations are not passive vessels of the past; they are active interpreters of it. A role that we social entrepreneurs should support creatively. Many have greater access to language, tools, and communities that enable them to name and process emotional experiences in ways their elders could not. This does not erase the legacy of silence, but it can disrupt its transmission. Any comprehensive view of intergenerational repair must also consider that young people carry not only the imprint of inherited wounds but also a distinct capacity to question, reframe, and transform them. Sometimes they are the very agents of change disrupting cycles that once seemed impossible to break. This can lead to the true embodiment of “intergenerational” healing as the support and care flow freely in both directions.

Taken together, these perspectives point us toward a more relational understanding of intergenerational trauma. We must resist casting either elders or young people as solely wounded or solely responsible for repair. Trauma may travel across generations, but so too does the capacity for healing. Elders hold lived histories, cultural memory, and specific forms of resilience; young people, meanwhile, often bring new language, openness, and a willingness to challenge inherited silences.

In the context of mental health, and more widely in how communities sustain themselves, the possibility of repair becomes optimal when these capacities meet and intertwine. It requires spaces where elders are supported to name and tend to long-held wounds, and where young people are recognised not only as inheritors of harm but as active participants in reshaping its meaning and aiding the healing process.

Intergenerational repair, then, is not a process of one group fixing another, but a shared practice: a mutual exchange in which wisdom and vulnerability, experience and imagination, are brought into the conversation. Only by holding both roles together does the possibility of breaking cycles and building something healthier in their place come fully into view.

Social entrepreneurs have a critical role to play in this transformation. By design, they challenge established systems and reimagine how care is delivered. Yet too often, health solutions overlook elders or treat them as peripheral or as the object of care. The opportunity and responsibility is to embed intergenerational thinking into these innovations. This may take the form of social prescribing or programmes that intentionally connect generations through shared experiences and support networks. The aim is not merely inclusion, but integration.

To take two examples from our Ashoka Fellows here in the UK: Immy Kaur’s work at Civic Square shows how intergenerational connection becomes a form of community intelligence. By creating shared civic spaces where elders, young people, families, and neighbours collaborate on the future of their place, she restores the flow of wisdom between generations.

Older residents bring memory, cultural grounding, and long-view judgment; younger people bring urgency, creativity, and new forms of agency. In her hands, community becomes a site of reciprocal learning, where wellbeing is strengthened not through services but through shared purpose, shared imagination, and shared responsibility. Immy demonstrates that when generations work side by side, a neighbourhood becomes more resilient, more emotionally literate, and more capable of nurturing its own good mental health.

Through Mark Swift’s leadership at Wellbeing Enterprises CIC, he and his team established social prescribing as a practical expression of the wisdom economy long before this phrase was commonly understood. Indeed, long before the NHS adopted the model nationally, he showed that people’s wellbeing improves most when they are connected to local assets, meaningful activities, and supportive relationships. His work helped reframe mental health as something that happens in the everyday spaces of life, in friendships, community groups, volunteering, creativity, and purpose, rather than solely in clinical settings. By building community knowledge and treating residents as holders of insight and experience, he demonstrated that social prescribing is not an adjunct to healthcare but a return to the deeper truth that people heal in connection, not isolation. In short, that social prescribing anchors good mental health in a social, relational, and culturally grounded domain.

I started this piece by talking about what truly matters in building healthier, more connected societies. I cited examples where I have drawn on the connectedness and the grounded reality of single social entrepreneurs seeking a conversation at the Friendship Bench during the Skoll World Forum. Social entrepreneurial leadership is, not surprisingly, all over this thought piece of mine and is rooted in the idea of the New Longevity movement championed by Ashoka. We have looked at the work of Dr. Dixon Chibanda, Immy Kaur, and Mark Swift, which demonstrates that this healthier, more connected society should not only be sought at the level of the individual but also at the level of the community.

Together with my fellow cofounders at the Elders Council for Social Entrepreneurs (Mel Young, Andrea Coleman, and me), the immediate concern is our own community. That is, the community of social innovators where we seek to learn and heal through the interaction of our elders and those who are younger within our social impact community. Ultimately, if we are entering a period in which progress is less assured, then our response must be to strengthen the human connections that sustain us. My journey has shown me that when elders are empowered as changemakers, as listeners, mentors, and anchors of community, the impact extends far beyond individual lives. At the same time, young people must not be seen only as those who receive this inheritance, but as active partners in shaping what comes next, bringing new language, insight, and a willingness to speak where silence once prevailed.