Are You Ready for an Encore?

Yesterday, we ran a short analysis of how Baby Boomers have a chance to drastically change the nonprofit landscape. And today, we have the great luxury of diving further into this topic by interviewing Marc Freedman.

Freedman is founder and CEO of Civic Ventures, a nonprofit think tank on boomers, work, and social purpose. He’s also the author of The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife. A renowned social entrepreneur, Freedman spearheaded the creation of AARP Experience Corps, now one of America’s largest nonprofit national service programs engaging people over 55, and The Purpose Prize, which annually provides five $100,000 prizes to social innovators in the second half of life.

We asked him the following questions via email.

CPC: You say that millions of people are entering their “encore years” between the end of midlife and the beginning of old age. What is your big dream for what people in this stage can do to improve our world?
Freedman: Our research shows that as many as 9 million people in the U.S., or 9 percent of all Americans ages 44 to 70, are currently in encore careers, having made a major career change after age 40 or come out of retirement to do work that combines personal meaning, continued income, and social purpose. These 9 million people are putting in 16.7 billion hours each year for the greater good in education, health care, government, and nonprofit organizations. Americans are living longer and working longer. If our additional working years can be focused on the greater good, we would be looking at a staggering windfall of new talent. It could be the human capital solution to much that ails us as a nation.

CPC: On Encore.org and in your book, The Big Shift, you encourage boomers at the end of midlife careers to look for “purpose-filled” work. Are you hearing from a lot of boomers that their first career was passion-less or didn’t provide some societal benefit?
Freedman: What we’re hearing is that priorities change over time. As we move into the second half of life, we have an increasing awareness of the time beyond our lives, the time that we will never see. As a result, there seems to be a corresponding increase in our desire to be generative, give back, or leave the world a better place than we found it. Thanks to longer life spans, we have the opportunity to live a legacy – not just to leave one.

CPC: What do boomers looking to change the world have to share with millennials, the up-and-coming leaders who seem to have a collective interest in social justice and making the world a better place?
Freedman: In a word, experience. Gary Maxworthy worked for 30 years in the food distribution business. When he approached 60, his wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Her passing sent Maxworthy into a period of soul-searching. He joined VISTA, part of the AmeriCorps national service program, and was assigned to the San Francisco Food Bank. He saw that the food bank, like most food banks, was giving out only canned and processed foods; it was all they could reliably distribute without food spoiling. Bringing his experience to bear, Maxworthy came up with a new distribution system. His program, Farm to Family, distributed more than 100 million pounds of fresh produce to needy families in California last year. That’s a solution for all ages.

CPC: And what do you think boomers can learn from millennials?
Freedman: Tons! Workplaces with four or even five generations all working together will soon become the norm. We’ll all learn from each other if we want to be successful.

CPC: What one big hurdle needs to be overcome for more people to consider encore careers?
Freedman: We’ve been remarkably adept at extending lives, but our imagination and innovation in remaking the shape of those longer lives have been struggling to keep pace. Today, the end of middle age is no longer, for most people, attached to the beginning of either retirement or old age. Individuals left in that lurch, in this unstable space that has no name, no clear beginning and end, no rites or routes of passage, face a contradictory culture, incoherent policies, institutions tailored for a different population, and a society that seems in denial that this period even exists. To help them, we need to create a new stage of life between the end of the middle years and the beginning of retirement and old age, an “encore” stage of life characterized by purpose, contribution, and commitment, particularly to the well-being of future generations. And we need to support people as they make the transition to this new stage – with career counseling, internships, fellowships, loans, and retraining.

CPC: Why does all this matter for younger people?
Freedman:Baby boomers are just the first wave of women and men passing into this new period, which amounts to a permanent change, a phase that will soon be occupied by their longer-living children and grandchildren. These individuals are the ones who stand to inherit a period that could one day become the best time of life. In crafting this new phase, we’ll inevitably revamp the nature of all the other stages along the way, opening up possibilities and options for younger people who can make important life decisions with the expectation of more than one bite at the apple.

That’s why we all have a stake in this project.  It’s our chance to turn the purported paradox of longevity – good for individuals, terrible for society – into a vast payoff for all generations, now and into the future.