What is the Modern Elder Academy? How did it begin?

MEA is on a mission to build a community of inspired and empowered mid-lifers and reframe midlife from a crisis to a calling.

MEA is on a mission to build a community of inspired and empowered mid-lifers and reframe midlife from a crisis to a calling. As the world’s first midlife wisdom school, MEA offers all-inclusive workshops and sabbaticals that provide the education and tools to help people feel relevant, with continued and clarified purpose, in midlife. In addition to our core weekly workshop intensives, we offer extended sabbaticals, an eight-week online program, and an alumni membership program. MEA is a social venture committed to socio-economic diversity, offering scholarships to over 50% of workshop attendees, and accessible rates to sabbatical and online participants. As a result, the MEA community is quite diverse including firemen, physical therapists, software engineers, university professors and CEOs and more.

The inspiration came to founder Chip Conley while writing his book, Wisdom@Work: The Making of a Modern Elder. Based on his own career and life experiences, this powerful idea — becoming a “modern elder” — launched our campuses, and MEA Online.