By Mark Miller, Tribune Media Services
There's no shortage of bad news about aging and retirement. Whether it's ballooning Social Security and Medicare payments or the brain drain of millions of baby boomers leaving the workforce, the headlines all seem to focus on the increasing burdens of an aging population.
There's not much we can do about aging; we're all doing it. But retirement? That's an idea that could be headed for the dustbin—if Marc Freedman has anything to say about it.
"For the last half century, we've had a cultural vision of success in later life that focused on liberation from work," says Freedman, founder and CEO of Civic Ventures, a think tank focused on engaging older adults.
That vision may have outlived its time—the result of financial need, expected labor shortages in certain areas of the workforce, and greater longevity. What's coming, Freedman thinks, will be longer working lives. The question is, working at what?
Freedman's answer: Create opportunities for older adults to start new careers—paid or volunteer—that allow them to make a positive social contribution in later life.
A national community has sprung up around this notion of "civic engagement" and Freedman's organization is, in many ways, at the hub. Civic Ventures has developed innovative programs like the Purpose Prize, a cash award given annually to social innovators over age 60. Civic Ventures also funds innovative career re-training programs at community colleges around the country.
Freedman co-founded a large non-profit national service program called the Experience Corps that preceded Civic Ventures, He also wrote "Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life" (Public Affairs Books, June 2007). The book focuses on how pathways can be created to help people transition into what he calls Encore careers.
Civic Ventures recently launched a free online community, Encorecareers.org, offering resources for career transitions.
"We want to help people make transitions into particular areas where there is a powerful need for people—areas like education, health, government and the non-profit arena," says Freedman.
Continued work, whether for pay or on a volunteer basis, is a win-win proposition, Freedman argues. It promotes individual well-being—especially in a rocky economy that threatens retirement portfolios and housing values.
"It starts with the bread-and-butter issues of income if people can genuinely get greater security with well-paying positions that have benefits," he notes. "Beyond that, we need to sell the idea of using the experiences you've had—that what you learn in life still matters—not just for yourself but also for the well-being of future generations.
Workers over 55 will be the fastest-growing segment of the labor force in the next decade, so the potential impact is not insignificant. "We need to acknowledge that it's not just a few people we're talking about, but tens of millions making this transition," says Freedman. "We need something like what we did with the GI bill."
The pent-up energy among boomers eager to re-focus on work that will leave a positive legacy is palpable. I sense it all the time in casual conversations with adults in their 50s, and surveys offer further evidence. A recent survey Civic Ventures helped sponsor found that over half of adults age 50 to 70 want to find ways to "contribute to the greater good" in retirement.
The starting point, Freedman says, is helping people with an instinct for new careers explore their options.
"We need to help people recognize they aren't alone—that they're part of a broader emerging movement," he says. What's more, he notes, opportunities are opening up in a number of key "helping" professions, including math and science teaching, nursing and non-profit management.
There's also a lot of ferment in higher education, with many colleges and universities creating new approaches focused on encore careers. Freedman is especially interested in the opportunity presented by the huge number of community colleges. Civic Ventures' pilot project at 10 such colleges will help develop expedited career re-training programs for boomers.
Freedman also advocates a new "social compact" between government and boomers: Fiscal and financial assistance would come in return for longer working lives in areas of high social need. That might include eliminating taxation of Social Security benefits to make the benefit more valuable, and plugging the "Medicare gap" years by making it possible for people in their 50s to buy into Medicare.
"We need to offer a deal for longer working lives that people would embrace—incentives that would get people looking forward to this stage of work not just to make ends meet but to be meaningfully engaged and use their experiences in ways they can be proud of," he says.
To learn more, check the online version of this column at www.retirementrevised.com for links to key resources you can use to research your own encore career.
(For millions of Baby Boomers, retirement is an opportunity for reinvention, rather than taking it easy. Mark Miller is helping write the playbook for the new career and personal pursuits of a generation. Mark blogs at www.retirementrevised.com; contact him with questions and comments at mark@retirementrevised.com)
© 2008 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
