While thinking about a topic for this month's column, I heard a story on BBC radio about Sun City in Arizona. Built solely as a retirement community in 1960, Sun City has been very successful promoting a lifestyle of golf, bowling, hot-dog suppers and pancake breakfasts.

But times have changed. Not only is such a withdrawal from society unattractive to the next wave of retirees, the Baby Boomers, I am going to throw out a challenge and say it is no longer an option!

Sun City was built fifty years ago against the advice of all the experts who said retirees would never leave their families to live among themselves. The experts and naysayers were wrong. Sun City grew and multiplied to other locations.

A retirement of 'play' was clearly attractive to those who worked in the industrialised economy of the early twentieth century. But that was then, and this is now, the year 2010. Baby Boomers who came to adulthood during the Civil Rights and Feminist movements of the 1960s want to stay involved, stay working, give back and continue to make a difference. For them golf is recreation, not a way of life, and hot dogs are not part of a healthy diet.

For Bermudians, buying a piece of land and building a house as legacy was the ultimate dream, especially for people deprived of wealth, opportunity, and even the right to vote. And build they did, often by moonlight and on the weekends, with approximately eighty percent of older Bermudians now owning their own home.

While creating a legacy was never easy, it is even more difficult today. On the negative side, we have a single-stream economy that is overdependent on international business, a glut of office space and condominiums, a decline in construction and tourism, unemployment and underemployment, increased violent and deadly crime and, last but not least, an unprecedented national debt in a time of local and global recession.

On the positive side, we are a small group of people on a tiny Island and we have faced massive challenges before. We have a history of weathering the storms of nature, of poverty, of slavery, segregation, social protests, and more.

But following the riots of the 1970s Bermuda experienced the most successful forty years of its entire history. Why? Because there were persons of vision and visionary leaders who could look into the future and say "Yes, we can" rebuild and regenerate our Island economy.

Regeneration means finding innovative solutions to the many complex problems facing our society today. For example, focusing on "black, male youth" excludes a huge part of the problem and a huge part of the solution. Where are the multi-generational solutions? Where are the parents and grandparents who are vital in the raising of young men and women?

Unfortunately, older people have been marginalised in a youth-oriented culture that has dismissed the importance of elders in the lives of the young, in the same way that culling old bull elephants led to a surge of juvenile delinquency among the young males.

As nature has shown, we need our elders to stay engaged-working, volunteering and contributing-to pass their wisdom on to the younger generation. (We also need reverse mentoring in technology and new ways of thinking and doing.) As a country and a people, we are facing some massive challenges, and if we are going to leave a legacy for our children and grandchildren that is not mired in negativity and failure we have to step up, speak out, and get involved in championing the right course.

Times have changed and our notion of 'legacy' needs to change also. We all need to think about what we are going to say to our grandchildren when they ask, "Why didn't you DO something when you had the chance?"

We have it in our power to come together as a people and find solutions through strategic planning, honest and ethical governance in the public and private sectors, wise and sustainable development, education and training of our people, support for the vulnerable, and opportunity for all. What will our legacy be? Will it be failure and lost opportunity, or a revolution of regeneration for future generations?

Marian Sherratt is President of SORCOS, a social research and consulting firm. She writes on issues concerning our ageing population each month in The Royal Gazette. Send email responses to m.sherratt@sorcos.com.