Below is a list of ChangingAging’s regular blog contributors.
Martin Bayne
Journalist, Buddhist monk, MIT graduate, and founder of the blog The Voice of Aging Boomers, Martin Bayne has had a colorful career. At the age of nineteen, while working at the Times Herald Record, he was contacted by the mother of a soldier serving in Vietnam. Her request that he help bring her son home to be with his father during open heart surgery catapulted Bayne into the world of advocacy. He arranged a meeting at the Pentagon with Lt. Col. John C. Payne, MD, in the Office of the US Army Surgeon General, and within a week, the soldier, John Fasanello of Florida, NY, was on a plane home.
A year later, motivated by a need to discover the source of self-compassion, Bayne entered Shasta Abbey, a Soto Zen Buddhist monastery, where he spent his next years learning to “sleep when tired and eat when hungry”—skills that would prove essential when he was immobilized after being hit by a car at the age of 31. Alive, yet unwilling to spend his time shaking his fist at the sky, he obtained his brokers license and began to market socially responsible funds as he recovered from his injuries. In 1992, a decade before most Americans were even remotely aware of a problem with their long-term health care system (LTC), and with the experience of protracted disability fresh in his mind, Bayne began publishing a newsletter and website under the nom de plume Mr. Long-Term Care. The website quickly grew to become one of the nation’s most trusted sources of information on long-term care. Additionally, Bayne was CEO and cofounder of New York Long-Term Care Brokers, one of the nation’s largest LTC insurance brokers. In the nineties, at the peak of his professional career and personal eldercare advocacy, Bayne was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. For the past ten years he has lived in an assisted living facility.
Ronni Bennett
Ronni Bennett coined the term “Elderblogger” and is the founder of Time Goes By, a wide-ranging blog covering social issues, work, retirement, age discrimination and ageism, politics, media, health, family, Medicare and Social Security, love and sex, entertainment, humor, grief and mortality, culture, technology and more – all as related to aging.
Thousands of readers visit Time Goes By every day or subscribe via RSS, email, Facebook and Twitter. You’ll also find here a vibrant community of smart, informed, thoughtful and funny elderbloggers and blog readers who enrich the conversation and widen the context creating a remarkable record of what it’s like to get old.
Ronni spent the last decade of her career (before being forced to retire) working on websites beginning as managing editor at CBSnews.com through other sites on sports medicine, restaurants, finance and business research.
For 35 years prior to that she produced for such network television programs as 20/20, The Barbara Walters Specials and other shows at NBC, PBS, CBS, Lifetime, etc.
In 2006, after 40 years in New York City, Ronni sold her apartment in Greenwich Village and moved to Portland, Maine. Since May 2010 she has lived in Lake Oswego, Oregon with her Savannah cat, Ollie.
Kyrié Carpenter
Kyrié’s joie de vie and curiosity are infectious. She has a passion for story; from myths and fairy tales to the ones we each have the opportunity to write each day. This love lead her to study integral coaching and depth psychology. ‘Psychology’ etymologically speaking means the study of soul. For Kyrié this means finding and tending to the soulful in everyday life. Kyrié is also an advocate for a graceful aging ideology and views crises (quarter-life, mid-life and eldership) as opportunities for embracing who we innately are. She believes the aging process facilitates personal development.
David Goff
In 2003 David Goff had a brain aneurism. As a result of his stroke, and the onset of a rare brain syndrome, he nearly died and ended up permanently disabled. This experience had a transformational effect on David, which made him “Lucky,” and cued him into how radically connected all things are. This broader awareness now informs his approach toward what it means to be human.
David is also a co-founder of the Elder Salon in Sebastopol CA, and has a monthly radio program (listen to archived programs on elderculture.com) called Growing An Elder Culture. He has authored Embracing Life: Toward A Psychology Of Interdependence (available through Amazon), and with his partner Alexandra Hart has written The Age of Actualization: A Handbook For Growing An Elder Community (also available through Amazon). He is currently active with the Senior Center Without Walls, a volunteer organization in California that serves the disabled and home-bound.
Jeanette Leardi
Jeanette Leardi is a Portland, Oregon, writer, editor, and community educator who has a passion for older adult empowerment and finds special personal fulfillment helping Boomers and older generations identify and share their wisdom with others. Her decade of experiences as the primary caregiver to both of her parents inspired her encore career goals of changing perceptions about the aging process and helping people appreciate elders’ inherent dignity, wisdom, and unique value as mentors and catalysts for social change. She accomplishes this through her successful presentations and classes in journaling, spiritual writing, memoir writing, personal myth-making, brain fitness, intergenerational communication, and caregiver support to people of all ages.
Jeanette’s publishing experiences include positions at Newsweek, Life, People, Condé Nast Traveler, and Sesame Street magazines and The Charlotte Observer. She has a master’s degree with honors in English from Rutgers University and a graduate certificate in gerontology from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She can be reached through her website, www.jeanetteleardi.com.
Kavan Peterson
Kavan Peterson is a co-founder of ChangingAging, a multi-blog network committed to challenging conventional views on aging and using social media to promote the equality, sustainability, health and well being of people of all ages. He was also co-founder of ChangingMedia, a full service creative consulting and production company working with higher education, non-profit and for-profit organizations.
Combining careers as a national journalist and social media entrepreneur, Kavan focuses on the power of user-generated content to communicate pro-aging ideas and build movements. He has developed strategies for organizations to understand and engage in social media communications that build purpose, engage audiences and make change.
As a reporter for Stateline.org in Washington, D.C., and contributor to NPR, Kavan specialized in social justice reporting on aging, gay rights, education reform, immigration and the death penalty.
A writer, blogger and videographer, Kavan enjoys exploring caves, mountain tops and vintage motorcycles, and splits time between his home in Baltimore and Missoula, Montana, with his wife and two kids.
Christina Pierpaoli
Christina M. Pierpaoli is a third year graduate student in the Clinical Geropsychology doctoral program at the University of Alabama under the mentorship of Dr. Patricia A. Parmelee. Her research explores associations of chronic illness (e.g. osteoarthritis, HIV/AIDS, obesity) with psychological health in older adults. Current areas of inquiry include how feelings of usefulness to others in later life predict active (vs. passive) coping strategies with chronic pain; daily variability in subjective age and corresponding health appraisals; as well as obesity and its linkages with pain, depression, and activity patterns among adults with osteoarthritis. She has been published in the Journals of Aging & Health, Sex & Marital Therapy, featured in Evidence Based Treatments for Eating Disorders: Children, Adolescents and Adults, and presented at the American Psychological Association and Gerontological Society of America’s national conferences. Christina was a Killam Fellow at the University of Toronto, and graduated as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, with a BA in psychology from American University in Washington, DC. Christina was a Graduate Council Research Fellow and President of the affiliate group of the Association for Women in Science at the University of Alabama.
Dr. Al Power
G. Allen Power, MD is a board certified internist and geriatrician, clinical associate professor of medicine at the University of Rochester, and a Fellow of the American College of Physicians / American Society for Internal Medicine. Dr. Power is a Certified Eden Alternative® Educator, a member of the Eden Alternative board of directors, and an international educator on transformational models of care for older adults, particularly those living with changing cognitive abilities.
Virgil Thomas
Virgil Thomas is the Technical Support Guide with The Eden Alternative. His focus is on social media outreach and connecting a generation of culture change advocates. A recent graduate of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, he earned a degree in Political Science with a focus in Political Philosophy. As son of Dr. Bill Thomas, Virgil grew up around The Eden Alternative and the culture change movement.
Since his freshmen year of college, Virgil has been active in the blogospher, writing for a student-run blog, USDemocrazy.com. He has been a contributor to ChangingAging.org since 2010. When he is not at work Virgil practices Martial Arts and enjoys time with his two German Shepherds, Carter and Valor.
Dr. Bill Thomas
Dr. Bill Thomas is an author, entrepreneur, musician, teacher, farmer and physician whose wide-ranging work explores the terrain of human aging. Best known for his health care system innovations, he is the founder of a global non-profit (The Eden Alternative) which works to improve the care provided to older people. He is the creator of The Green House® which Provider Magazine has called the “pinnacle of culture change.” Dr. Thomas also developed the Senior ER model of care and is now working to transform the acute care services provided to elders. Most recently, Dr. Thomas is the Co-Founder and Chairmain of Minka Homes and Communities.
Learn more about Dr. Thomas at drbillthomas.org.
