“Growing up, I had to serve 2 mothers. You didn’t know, did you?”
That sentence – spoken by Benita Cooper’s grandmother, Mei, in Cantonese on a phone call just weeks before Cooper turned 26 – became the spark for something far bigger than a family history project. The words weren’t dramatic in tone. In fact, Cooper says her grandmother was “very positive and courageous,” a woman who rarely used language of hardship, sadness or regret.
“It wasn’t a conversation between grandmother and granddaughter, it was simply human to human,” says Cooper. “At the end, she said, ‘No one knows any of this. No one knows because no one asks.’ Before the call, I had never felt farther away from her. After the call, I had never felt closer.”
“I think that speaks to the importance of stories,” she adds. “Stories tell the nuances and contradictions that aren’t easily summarized in a word or even a sentence.”
Cooper had been living in a loft in Old City Philadelphia and working at an architecture firm when homesickness nudged her to call her grandmother out of the blue. She expected a brief check-in.
Instead, they stayed on the phone for almost an hour, talking about Mei’s personal history, including how, as a baby, she had been taken away from her birth family and raised by another woman in the village.
“What is remarkable and important is not the shocking and complicated facts,” Cooper says. “It is her choice to live life with courage and positivity and to open her deeper emotions to me, which showed through in her voice.”
At the end of that first call, Cooper asked if she could call again, and Mei laughed – “the happiest laugh I’ve ever heard,” Cooper says. That laugh inspired the nonprofit The Best Day of My Life So Far.
Cooper says the experience unlocked something profound.
“I didn’t just realize I had uncovered family history – I discovered something deeper: her voice and her truth,” she says.
Over time, the act of listening transformed into a belief that storytelling could heal what isolation and fast-paced modern life had fractured. By 2008 – amid an economic downturn and widespread anxiety – Cooper sensed a need far beyond her own family.
“All I could think about was loneliness, memory and the urgent need for connection,” she says.
So she approached a neighborhood senior center and asked to borrow a basement office for an hour each week to sit with older adults and listen to their stories. The center agreed – but only for 6 weeks. Their first meeting was on September 24, 2009.
What began as a temporary experiment quickly bloomed. Participants started calling those afternoons “Party time.” Every week they gathered. Cooper began a blog to record what she heard. Within weeks, older adults asked to continue beyond the original 6 sessions. By October, without hesitation, Cooper said yes.
“I was amazed by how much happier, stronger and more confident our group participants had become in just a matter of weeks,” she says.
The blog gave the stories visibility beyond that single room. Messages poured in from people in other cities, inspired by what they read, offering to help transcribe stories. Younger volunteers joined. What started as one table in a basement grew into a quiet, deliberate national network of intergenerational conversation.
Today, The Best Day of My Life So Far is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit with a clear mission: to “provide a cure for social isolation by empowering older adults to share life stories and inspiring human connection across generational and social divides.” The heart of that mission is simple but transformative. The organization acknowledges the profound loneliness many older adults face and offers them a deeply human remedy: dignity, attention, empathy, community.
Their signature program – the Storytelling Groups – is legally trademarked and has been implemented in dozens of senior centers, assisted living facilities and community organizations nationwide.
The Best Day of My Life So Far also offers Story Pop-Up Events for one-time community storytelling experiences; Story Cure Seminars for caregivers, social workers and educators; a Grand Camp Youth Leadership Academy to train teens to connect with older adults; and a Social Connection Work Group to bring together professionals from healthcare, social services and education to rethink elder care and community connection.
Yet for Cooper, the organization’s power remains rooted in what might seem like small acts – the same kinds of gestures that once bridged the emotional distance between her and her grandmother.
“The power happens when one person’s willingness to share their truths reaches somebody who is willing to listen,” says Cooper. “It’s especially moving when it’s from old to young, spanning past and future.”
The ripple effect feels both ordinary and enormous.
“Those are the seemingly small moments when storytelling sparks the greatest thing: genuine human connection,” she says. “Story by story, we can build and enrich intergenerational relationships.”
Cooper never set out to run a nonprofit. By trade, she is an architect running her own design and construction firm – and a mother.
“But the nonprofit work is hard, magical – really, everything,” she says.
It’s taught her that even tiny, handmade gestures can matter. She remembers packing tea bags and stationery into small gift boxes before an event, and watching someone open one and ask: “Do you want to listen to my story and write for me?”
“That simple question underlines how meaningful small gestures of care can be when given with sincerity,” she says. “Multiply those moments across years, across communities, across lives – and the impact deepens.”
Her grandmother’s voice remains her North Star. That first call continues to guide the organization’s values – and her belief in the quiet, world-shifting power of human attention.
“I hold fast to the belief that the nonprofit’s mission is both deeply personal and universally human,” Cooper says. “To give time, space and courage for stories to be told. To teach listening as an act of care, to build community across age, cultural and social divides – that’s something special.”
