Nancy Schlossberg has never forgotten the commencement speech that Millicent McIntosh, the president of her alma mater, Barnard College, gave at Schlossberg’s graduation ceremony in 1951. “She told the Barnard girls that we could do it all,” Schlossberg recalls. “I believed her.”

Now 95, Schlossberg still heeds McIntosh’s call to action. After college, she went on to get her master’s and doctorate degrees in counseling at Columbia University and embarked on a long career in higher education, with stints at Wayne State University, Howard University and the Pratt Institute, as well as 27 years at the University of Maryland. Her C.V. includes several books on coping with big life transitions, a presidential citation from the American Psychological Association and numerous awards, including one for being the first woman executive at the American Council of Education, where she established the Office of Women in Higher Education in 1973. Along the way, she met her husband, Stephen Schlossberg, a nationally recognized union organizer who later became general counsel of United Auto Workers and served as undersecretary for labor-management relations during the Reagan administration, and the couple raised two children. Stephen passed away in 2011.

“I married a feminist husband, and he was fabulous,” Schlossberg says. “At one point, I said, ‘Maybe I’d better quit working—I can’t handle the house, teaching and the children.’ He told me, ‘We can figure this out together.’ I’ve continued working to this day.”

Now, with retired attorney Michael Karp, Schlossberg leads the Aging Rebels group at Sarasota’s Senior Friendship Centers, where she, Karp and other participants discuss all aspects of the aging process, from loneliness to finances, friendship, physical and mental limitations, fear of death, grief and isolation.

So what does Schlossberg attribute her own longevity to? “I’ve always had good relationships with people,” she says. “Humor is very much a part of my life. I’m still involved and active in the community. I’m curious and persistent. I’ve had a wonderful career, marriage and two children who are now my collaborators as I face the final period of my life. I must be the luckiest person in the world.”