Our mission
Bringing generations back one careful match at a time.
Prime Citizens is an organization built around a movement, to bring generations back together, to connect, communicate, share, and be in real conversation. To return to the natural state that human connection was designed for.
Prime Citizens is a resource designed to bring people aged 65 to 80 back into meaningful conversations with adults aged 18 or older who could benefit from their accumulated experience, one careful match at a time.
Why this matters
A need for connection.
A lifetime of experience.
Loneliness affects people at every age. At the same time, a growing older generation carries decades of experience. Prime Citizens brings these two realities together through thoughtful introductions and honest conversation.
Up to1 in 3
older adults are estimated to be affected by social isolation.
The person behind the idea
Benjamin Arazy.
Vancouver-based executive. Father of four. Grandpa of two.
My name is Benjamin Arazy. I am a Vancouver-based executive with a background across medical technology, global business operations, and long-term strategic work. Most of my career has been spent building regulated businesses in complicated jurisdictions, the kind of work that teaches you patience, and teaches you that people are the same everywhere: the questions, the fears, the hopes.
I am 64 years old. I am the father of four grown children, each working through the questions of their own moment in life, the same kind of questions Knowledge Seekers come to us with. I am the grandpa of two young and curious granddaughters.
I am moving into what this movement calls the prime years, and I am facing the same questions I imagine most people my age are asking themselves quietly: how do I stay relevant, how do I keep contributing, how do I make what I have learned useful to someone who is still in the middle of the questions I have already lived through.
For most of my life I have been doing a version of this informally. With my children. With my employees. With colleagues. With interns who came through my businesses and are now running their own. With clients who became friends, who called about one thing and stayed on the phone about another. Not as advice from a podium, as conversations, on real questions, without a clock.
Prime Citizens is what happens when I stop doing this informally and start doing it deliberately, with structure, and open the same door for other people my age who have been doing the same thing without a name for it.
That is what motivates me.
Our symbol
A lifetime of learning.
The wisdom knot.
Our symbol is inspired by the Nyansapo, the wisdom knot, one of the oldest of the Akan Adinkra symbols of Ghana. It stands for the kind of wisdom that comes from having lived, from patience, and from the willingness to sit with something difficult until it is understood.
Nyansapo wosane no badwemma
Only the wise can untie the wisdom knot.
We drew ours as a single figure carrying the knot at the centre, a person shaped by a lifetime of untying things, with the small gold sun of what they have learned held above them. That is who we are looking for. That is what a Prime Citizen is.
Help build the movement
If the movement resonates,
there is a place for you.
If any of this is you, if the movement resonates and you would like to be part of building it, please write to me at founding@primecitizens.org. I read every one.
Real people. Real experience. In conversation.