Older adults as change makers: That has a sweet ring to it.
The AARP Purpose Prize award, which honors people 50 and older who are using their experience and skills to create a better world, was recently presented to seven nonprofit founders and came with a $50,000 prize in recognition and support of their work.
One of this year’s winners, Jennifer Jacobs, 53, a nuclear engineer and former nuclear operations officer for the US Army Reserve, started her pivot 13 years ago when she read an article about foster care and the difficulty of finding a child’s family.
Her years of work focused on nuclear nonproliferation crisscrossed with the intelligence community whose analysts often track and find terrorist networks. As unlikely as it sounds, that experience drew the connection for Jacobs between how similar technology could help foster care professionals find those children’s families.
It didn’t happen quickly, but in 2011, she co-founded Connect Our Kids, a technology nonprofit based in Falls Church, Va., that helps social workers, lawyers, and volunteers to do just that and provide support to both children and their families. The tools are now being used by 2,000 foster care professionals in more than 40 states and Canada.
“Hearing the stories of reconnection and reunion made possible by our tools gives us a daily sense of profound purpose,” Jacobs told Yahoo Finance. “There’s no greater reward.”
When the Purpose Prize was launched in 2005, its unofficial tagline was “the flipside of lifetime achievement award.” The idea instead was to invest in what someone over 50 would do next.
“What distinguishes so many of the Purpose Prize winners is not only entrepreneurial intuition, but they’re also practical problem-solvers, rather than wild-eyed dreamers,” said Marc Freedman, co-CEO and founder of social impact organization CoGenerate, the group that created the Prize. “They represent a sense of the possibilities of this stage of life.”
The Prize, now under the auspices of AARP, showcases how older trailblazers are having a positive influence — working in fields such as healthcare, voter education, foster care, and financial empowerment for those who have been incarcerated.
As Jacobs realized, the transition often revolves around redeploying existing experience and skills.
That was true for Jim Ansara, another prize recipient. After Ansara retired and sold his company Shawmut Design and Construction to his employees, he began to look around for what to do next. As he was struggling to figure out the answer, a charitable donation to the global nonprofit Partners In Health led to a trip to Haiti.
It was eye-opening. The depth of the poverty stunned him. He quickly saw that he could redeploy his professional background to take action beyond a philanthropic gift of cash.
Ansara, 66, began by volunteering to help construct a small hospital in Haiti. But before that could get rolling, an earthquake struck. He flew to Haiti from his home outside of Boston to see where he could be of service. He learned that the country's primary hospital, General Hospital in Port -au -Prince was completely destroyed. Then, rather than building a tiny community facility, he found himself leading the construction of a 20 5,000-square-foot, 3 00-bed national teaching hospital in the town of Mirebalais.
That’s where the concept came to life for Build Health International (BHI), the nonprofit he co-founded to construct healthcare facilities in impoverished areas. In the decade since, the organization has designed, built, and equipped over 200 medical facilities across the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa.
It was a bumpy path. “Even after completing the major project in Haiti, there were many times that we tried and failed before we succeeded,” Ansara said. “Especially in those early days, I was so grateful for mentors, colleagues, and friends who believed in our vision.”
A growing number of midlife and later-life transition programs are gaining traction across the country. Driving the trend: baby boomers retiring and looking for pivots.
The programs, commonly based at large universities, generally have about two dozen students and involve anywhere from four months to one year of on-campus and hybrid sessions. Tuition runs from under $4,000 to more than $70,000.
“The concept is to create a blueprint of what you’ve done and dig into that, along with your values and strengths, to discern what you want to do next,” Anne Button, the founding director of the CU Denver Change Makers program, told me. “Most of our fellows are recently retired or on the edge of doing so and are looking to make a social impact.”
In November, I’ll be co-leading a weeklong workshop, on the Rising Circle Ranch in Santa Fe, N.M., titled Crafting Your Encore: Finding Purpose, Passion, and a Paycheck in Your Next Chapter to help older adults reimagine their career in midlife and beyond.
We’ll deep dive on things we’ve spent our entire careers exploring — how to discover (and rediscover) a sense of purpose, how to use our skills and life experience to make a difference, how to shift easily as the world around us changes, how to work alongside younger leaders, and how to finance these longer lives we hope to enjoy.
My co-leader is Marci Alboher, vice president of CoGenerate and author of “The Encore Career Handbook.” The two of us aren’t necessarily trying to change the world but to help other people change theirs.
“Our mission is to show our cohort what’s possible when we build on decades of lived experience, skills gained through our working years, and accumulated passion,” Alboher said.
Kerry Hannon is a Senior Columnist at Yahoo Finance. She is a career and retirement strategist, and the author of 14 books, including "In Control at 50+: How to Succeed in The New World of Work" and "Never Too Old To Get Rich." Follow her on X @kerryhannon.
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