About Us

Silver Century Foundation Projects

This website is our primary initiative and educational effort. It’s designed to address your concerns and issues, whether you’re in midlife and just beginning to think about your later years, or you’re older, approaching retirement or past it. You’re apt to live a long time, and what you do from here on out will largely determine the quality of your life in the future. Will it be productive and enjoyable? Will you be comfortable financially or age into poverty? We think you’ll find a lot here that’s helpful.

The Silver Cinema has been another major endeavor—a way of reaching out to local communities by showing films that deal intelligently with aging. After every screening, we invited the audience to participate in a facilitated conversation about issues the movie raised.

SCF also sponsors broader community conversations about aspects of aging, led by a professional facilitator.

Website

From our perch on the Internet, we explore aging from many points of view. You’ll find useful information, thoughtful articles and unusual perspectives here. Think you already know as much as you want to about growing older? Take one of our quizzes and find out how many myths about aging are mistaken for fact.

The Features and Perspectives pages present articles and essays that address the concerns we all have as we look ahead to our later years. Click on Issues to find links to excellent newspaper and magazine pieces about aging that are available on other websites.

The Resources page is divided into eight sections, which offer reviews of books, films, reports and websites, all delving into aspects of growing older. The books we’ve chosen include fiction and nonfiction along with children’s books that present older characters in positive ways, while the films we’ve singled out explore people’s relationships with family, friends and lovers at midlife and beyond. The reports—summarized for you—link to studies and analyses by widely respected organizations. The reviewed websites offer everything from topnotch medical advice to financial strategies to prepare for a long retirement.

SCF’s Photo Gallery showcases photographs that challenge the stereotypical images of aging that are everywhere in our culture. Finally, our Blog page invites you to consider what it’s like to grow older and to become part of a dialogue about the varied experiences of aging.

Silver Cinema

From 2003 through 2008, SCF offered its Silver Cinema program in New Jersey as a way to help people look at their own aging. Audiences watched a film that had something to say about growing older and then participated in a facilitated conversation about the movie.

To select our cinema portfolio, we formed an advisory committee. Members watched scores of films, many of them suffused with gloomy images of growing older. Just as many offered silly and insulting messages meant to be humorous. We chose movies instead that dealt sensibly with the later years and focused on individuals in the second half of life who were heroes of their own stories. These cinematic explorations included Hollywood feature films as well as independent motion pictures, foreign films and movies made for TV networks or cable.

The Silver Cinema program showed these films in a number of different venues such as local libraries and retirement communities. After each screening, a facilitator invited the audience to compare “reel life” with “real life” and to discuss the issues raised, which ranged from difficult mother-daughter relationships to later-life love stories.

You can visit our Resources page to read reviews of some of the films screened during the Silver Cinema program.

Conversations about Aging

SCF sponsors community conversations led by a professional facilitator. The topics focus on different aspects of growing older, bringing together people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives to talk about something they may never have fully confronted before: their own aging.