About

The movement, in plain words.

Written by the person building it.

Our mission

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.

A Prime Citizen and a Knowledge Seeker in conversation at a kitchen table.

Our symbol

The classical Adinkra Nyansapo symbol — the wisdom knot.
The Adinkra Nyansapo — 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.

The Prime Citizens symbol — our interpretation of the wisdom knot.
Our interpretation — the Prime Citizens symbol.

How we are being formed

Prime Citizens is being formed. Our intent is to establish it as a nonprofit organization.

Who I am

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.

The team being built

Prime Citizens is being built by a small founding office. Around it, a wider group is forming.

A small team of advisors already supports the day-to-day work, and expressions of interest are coming in from four directions — from people who see themselves as Prime Citizens, from Knowledge Seekers who have been looking for something like this, from researchers and practitioners whose work touches on what we are building, and from founding contributors who want to help this exist.

Two groups are being assembled in parallel with the pilot. A Founding Circle of contributors is being convened internationally. A Founding Advisors panel is being convened alongside it — including researchers whose work touches on the wellbeing of both sides of this exchange, at every stage of life, and open to advisors from other fields whose experience is relevant to what we are building. Both groups will be publicly named as they close.

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.