Storytelling Across Generations: The Legacy Project and Gray Panthers NYC Partnership
After meeting Legacy Project CEO and co-founder Arielle Galinsky at the ASA conference this year, in April, Gray Panthers NYC joined The Legacy Project, Inc. for a Global Intergenerational Week webinar, our first public collaboration and the start of what we hope is a long one. The Legacy Project is a national nonprofit that connects younger and older adults through storytelling and multigenerational friendship, working to combat social isolation and document life stories worth remembering. It's a mission that runs parallel to our own, and the webinar made the case for why our two organizations belong in the same room — and on the same stage again.
Legacy Project CEO and co-founder Arielle Galinsky opened the conversation by framing intergenerational storytelling as connective tissue: a way for younger and older adults, often kept apart by circumstance rather than choice, to find the common ground that advocacy is built on. That framing set the tone for everything that followed, as Gray Panthers board member Ron Roel and President Michelle Arnot joined two of the Legacy Project's Intergenerational Changemaker Fellows to talk about what storytelling actually does — for relationships, and for movements.
Ron, a former Newsday journalist, called storytelling humanity's oldest tool for building connection, tracing it back to campfires long before anyone thought to write anything down. He pointed to Gray Panthers' first major webinar, on the isolated deaths of nursing home residents during the pandemic, as proof: shared stories let people recognize that their pain, however singular it felt, was not theirs alone. Michelle grounded the conversation in Gray Panthers' founding voice, invoking Maggie Kuhn, and traced storytelling's throughline from Transformation Tuesday all the way to the UN, where GPNYC co-chairs the Stakeholder Group on Ageing. Individual stories of ageism, caregiving, and isolation, she said, aren't just anecdotes — collected across people, generations, and countries, they become the pattern that advocacy is built on.
What made the April webinar feel less like a one-off and more like a partnership taking shape was the sense, echoed by Arielle, Ron, and Michelle alike, that neither organization is interested in doing this work alone. Movements lose something when they skip a generation, and so do organizations that stay in their own lane. Gray Panthers NYC and The Legacy Project are already looking at what comes next: co-presenting at the American Society on Aging conference in 2027, and building out more joint webinars that put our communities — and our stories — directly in conversation with each other.
We're proud to stand alongside The Legacy Project and champion the work Arielle and her team are doing to connect generations across the country. Watch the full April webinar on YouTube, and stay tuned — this is just the beginning of what we're building together.
