While the Ambassadors Program offers a foundation of knowledge and connection, it is the dedication and creativity of each Ambassador that bring its mission to life. The following stories showcase how these individuals are applying SCL ‘s New Map of Life principles to create meaningful change across diverse domains.

Kate Jerome

Empowering future generations through dialogue
Children’s book author and publishing executive Kate Jerome has long been interested in providing children with books that pique their curiosity and imagination. But she says her real epiphany came when she realized that “reading opens doors for children but it’s conversations that give them the courage to go through them.” So when Kate participated in the inaugural year-long class at Stanford’s Distinguished Career Institute (“one of the best professional years of my life!”) she jumped at the chance to align with SCL to further study and promote intergenerational conversations.

While working with SCL, she became intrigued with its New Map of Life Program—and she felt it particularly important to support the key pillar of investing in future centenarians. “When most people hear the word longevity, they think of older adults, but the broader definition has to do with a successful life and health span that begins in childhood,” Jerome says. “Since my specialty is building cutting edge products for kids based on the latest and greatest research, I decided to reach out to the CEO of the South Carolina Aquarium to see what I could do for them. I’ve sat on their Board for almost twenty years now and I’m always so impressed with their willingness to consider innovative ideas.”  As a result, Kate proposed an innovative program for the Aquarium that will deliver ocean conservation content supported by a communication curriculum scaffolding that will develop kids’ in-person communication skills. “They were thrilled,” she says.

This spring, working with fellow Aquarium educators, she will launch the first iteration of the program, offering a group of twenty kids ages 9- 11 weekly “Dock Talks” about the ocean environment over the span of one month. “Picture us sitting cross-legged on the dock, talking and interacting in this beautiful, invigorating, oceanside scene,” she says. Adults and mentors will work with the kids to help them develop such skills as active listening and effective questioning with the ultimate objective of building their curiosity, resilience, and belief in their own self-efficacy, which are skills SCL’s New Map of Life identifies as critical for success at every age. “What we want to do is have the kids laughing and talking and learning and enjoying themselves. But when they leave, they’ll have become more fluent in very specific skills that they didn’t even know they were learning.”

A key element of the program is its emphasis on intergenerational communication, one of the experiences identified by SCL as essential to healthy longevity. “Conversation will be happening between the adults and the kids, and the kids will have peer-to-peer experiences as well. Then they’ll go home and they’ll demonstrate what they’ve learned to their parents and siblings through the fun game suggestions we’ll provide.”

As SCL underscores, says Jerome, “for the first time in history, we’ve got four and five generations alive at the same time. If these children are going to live century-long lives, they’re going to have lots of opportunities to work with people of different ages and successful communication will be important to them.”

For Jerome, the work is personally gratifying, an extension of the passion she has felt since the beginning of her career. “I absolutely love to see that little ‘aha’ moment when a child doesn’t understand something and all of a sudden they get it,” she says.

That’s part of what moved her to use her role as SCL Ambassador to reach out to young people. “There are so many wonderful people helping older adults with mid-life transitions; but I think it’s equally important to support the younger generation because the sooner we help kids learn certain skills, the sooner they’ll be able benefit from them during a long lifetime.”

After her Dock Talks pilot with the SC Aquarium, Jerome intends to offer her in-person communication program to other informal learning centers such as other aquariums, zoos, and museums. “The underlying communication curriculum can serve as a scaffolding to deliver any content that the institution is seeking to convey,” she says.

And the value of the Ambassador program to her work? She can brainstorm with a wide range of people from around the world and share what she’s doing as broadly as possible. From her own experience, she says she thinks the most effective projects Ambassadors can undertake involve infusing longevity principles into the work they’re already doing. “Let me take your notions, let me apply it to my work, and let me see if I can help you achieve greater impact.”

A vision for equity across generations
Two of the driving missions in Emilio Umeoka’s life – a passion for the career advancement of women and for creating social changes that support healthy longevity – come from his connection to his family.

Emilio Umeoka

“I have two daughters, and I know it’s much harder for female founders to be successful, to prove themselves, to get funds. I want to create a better path for female leaders,“ he says of his long-time involvement in female mentorship programs.

And now, he adds, he has a five-month-old granddaughter as well, which has caused him to think deeply about the future impacts of longevity.  “My granddaughter may live to be a hundred. And if she works for sixty years, her work experience will have very different trajectory than mine.  There are social impacts we need to start talking about now because things take decades to change.”

Umeoka, who was in the first cohort of SCL’s Ambassadors program, has swiftly evolved from educating himself about longevity research and its implications to spearheading the development of communication materials that will enable Ambassadors to carry a consistent SCL message broadly to their communities. He’s particularly focused on how to reach business leaders, since he himself spent much of his career as a corporate executive for tech companies. “I need to focus where I can impact,” he says.

In addition to developing a cache of resources for SCL Ambassadors, he also delivers talks to spread the word. As a native Brazilian, he is also tapped to give talks and speak to media in Portuguese. “My parents were Japanese. I was born and raised in Brazil. And I have lived in Asia and in Africa, as well as the United States,” he says. “I have this very blended culture.”

Like Jerome, he came to the Ambassadors program by way of the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute. He began taking classes on sustainability, and then longevity. He began to recognize that ageism was playing a discriminatory role in his older friends’ efforts to job-hunt, and he decided to extend to elders his life-long commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. He aims to reach people in their thirties and forties, he says, “because those are the people that I’ll need to influence to make some of the changes needed in the near future.”

Charting new paths for Russia’s workforce
Anna Slavnova, a Russian human resources professional with a Ph.D. in economics, has worked at a variety of jobs in her four decades in the work force. She launched her career as an academic, then worked for huge multinational companies including Price Waterhouse, as a consultant in Russia, and for smaller local companies, including a construction company. And in that diversity of experience she feels lucky. Most young career professionals she speaks to don’t imagine a career like hers. They’ve given little thought to where they will be in five, 15 or 20 years. “They start to think about this when they are in crisis, which is a little bit late,” she says, laughing ruefully.

Anna Slavnova

Last fall, when Slavnova joined SCL’s first cohort of longevity Ambassadors, she found a framework for communicating the value of her eclectic approach. She’d been urged to connect with SCL by one of the organizers of the new Ambassador program, Katya Pechenikhina, with whom she had worked at Price Waterhouse early in her career. And when she joined the Ambassadors cohort she connected deeply with the research and approach described in the New Map of Life, SCL’s blueprint for supporting longer lives that are healthier and financially sustainable.

Now, working as an independent consultant in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Slavnova has prepared multiple slide decks in Russian using the research and framing of SCL’s New Map of Life which she takes to different professional communities to provide seminars and workshops. “I get them to imagine different aspects of the longevity issues, such as how longevity will impact them as managers, how it will impact their business, how it will restructure the workforce they will have in the next five or ten years, and how it will impact them as people.”

In the beginning, she says, managers resist, saying longevity concerns are not important to their business. “But I’m talking about themselves, and about their workforce, and how it’ll change in the near future – and actually about the longevity of their business. Because everything depends on people, and we have such demographic issues right now in Russia that people will be obliged to work longer. Businesses will be obliged to rehire senior people. Otherwise, they will stop the economy.”

Slavnova reminds them that the current workforce will live longer and work longer. And she challenges them to consider whether they themselves have a personal longevity strategy for a life that’s likely to extend far longer than they might imagine. “They don’t think in a strategic way about their personal longevity strategy, even a small point like building a flexible career,” she says. They are successful and make a lot of money right now, but aren’t prepared to make a smooth transition if they face a career crisis.  “They don’t think about education, about their personal brand, or their professional network,” she says. “But when people don’t think strategically about themselves they outsource their life to their employers.”

“Right now, we have a of cohort of people here in the national market. They are not employable anymore, or they go through such a crisis that they cannot find the relevant job for themselves,” Slavnova says. “These are people who might have been laid off from very high-powered jobs, and don’t have the flexibility or connections to pivot to a new position. To be prepared, people need to maintain professional connections, concentrate on developing career diversity through a portfolio career, and continue to learn and develop new areas of expertise.”

In her workshops, she encourages participants to think about the four pillars of planning for longevity: a ‘portfolio’ or flexible career; financial planning; health; and lifelong learning. And she is now a regular speaker on longevity at an MBA program in Moscow Graduate School of Business, where the students first suppose longevity has nothing to do with them – and then become persuaded that longevity trends are not only essential for business management, but also for their own personal paths through life.

After her talks, students often pursue Slavnova for advice about their own careers. She urges them to develop personal financial literacy and to pay careful attention to how they will finance a century-long life.

Using elements drawn from SCL’s New Map of Life, she makes a powerful business case for the need to include longevity in economic planning. She argues against the notion that people over 60 or 70 are not productive, and instead points to them as a labor pool with big potential in an economy where worker shortages loom. She’s also supervising a graduate student on a project to understand the motivation of older people who undertake new intellectual challenges, such as learning English from scratch, to determine if that leads them to seek new or additional employment.

As for herself? She’s 56 and has no intention of slowing down. Slavnova calls herself an introvert, but says she has learned to love connecting people in useful ways, loves providing inspiration for new pathways to embrace a long and creative life. She’s taking a seven-month course in biohacking at Moscow State Medical University, which will result in a certificate that will allow her to share what she’s learned with others. And she dreams of returning to her roots as a university professor and launching some kind of longevity institute or research center in Russia.

Learn more about our team of Ambassadors

If you are interested in applying to become an SCL Ambassador, please contact us at: [email protected].