Acting Their Age

Five older nonprofit leaders are honored for working to solve social problems in innovative ways

Five nonprofit leaders, ages 60 to 91, were named winners this month of the second annual Purpose

Prize, an award that honors older Americans who are working to solve social problems in innovative ways. Each winner will receive $100,000.

Selected from more than 1,000 nominations, the winners started projects to improve hospital safety, keep siblings together in foster care, improve student achievement through arts education, provide nurses for high-risk newborns, and train disaster search dogs.

The Purpose Prize was created by Civic Ventures, a think tank in San Francisco that promotes projects to tap into the expertise of people in their later years.

The winners were selected — from among 15 finalists who won $10,000 awards in June — by a committee of 21 business, political, arts, and nonprofit leaders headed by Sherry Lansing, chief executive of the Sherry Lansing Foundation and former chair of Paramount Pictures’ Motion Picture Group.

Money for the awards was provided by two foundations: the Atlantic Philanthropies, in New York, and the John Templeton Foundation, in West Conshohocken, Pa.

Following are the winners:

Donald Berwick, 60, co-founder and chief executive of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement; Cambridge, Mass.

Why he won: Dr. Berwick, who co-founded the institute in 1991, started two campaigns to reduce unnecessary hospital deaths, infections, and other medical harm.

The 100,000 Lives Campaign, which ran from December 2004 to June 2006, enlisted more than 3,000 hospitals to provide monthly mortality statistics and adopt methods to curb hospital deaths — including measures to reduce infections, checks to make sure all medications taken by a patient are appropriate, and “rapid-response teams” that can act at the first sign of patient decline.

The institute estimates that hospitals saved more than 120,000 lives by participating in the campaign and other programs to improve care.

The institute started the two-year 5 Million Lives Campaign last December to reduce incidents of medical harm by asking hospitals to take additional preventive measures.

Dr. Berwick is also a clinical professor of pediatrics and health-care policy at Harvard Medical School.

Gordon Johnson, 74, founder and chief executive of Neighbor to Family; Daytona Beach, Fla.

Why he won: The former head of Illinois’s Department of Child and Family Services, Mr. Johnson founded his organization in 1998 to take a new approach to foster care. Neighbor to Family works to ease the trauma of children who are taken from their homes by working to keep siblings together and to “professionalize” foster parents by making them salaried employees. It assigns teams of biological and foster parents, therapists, and caseworkers to each child.

Neighbor to Family has helped 5,000 children, 4,100 of them siblings. It now operates in five states — Florida, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia.

Before starting Neighbor to Family, Mr. Johnson was president of the Jane Addams Hull House Association in Chicago.

H. Eugene Jones, 91, founder of Opening Minds Through the Arts; Tucson

Why he won: A former businessman, Mr. Jones started his arts-education group in 1999. Basing its programs on the findings of brain research, it integrates music and the arts into elementary-school teaching as a way to improve academic achievement. Learning to play the violin, for example, helps fourth graders improve their abstract reasoning; moving with dancers helps second graders learn critical-thinking skills.

Opening Minds Through the Arts started in three schools and today serves 17,000 children — 60 percent from low-income families — in 36 public schools in Tucson.

One study found that after three years in the program, third-grade students scored significantly higher than their counterparts on standardized tests in language, mathematics, and reading.

Wilma Melville, 73, founder of National Disaster Search Dog Foundation; Ojai, Calif.

Why she won: Ms. Melville decided to start a group to train dogs to search for survivors in the wreckage of disasters in 1996 — a year after she spent a week with her own trained black labrador at the scene of the Oklahoma City bombing and noticed how few trained dogs were there.

The National Disaster Search Dog Foundation developed a program to rescue abandoned dogs, train them in about a year, then have them work with firefighters to get additional training. It has produced 85 canine search teams, certified by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, that it provides free to fire departments. The dogs have searched for survivors following disasters including the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Before starting the organization, Ms. Melville was a retired physical-education teacher.

Sharon Rohrbach, 64, founder and chief executive of Nurses for Newborns Foundation; St. Louis

Why she won: After spending 16 years as a neonatal nurse, Ms. Rohrbach created her group to try to bring down infant mortality rates.

Nurses for Newborns brings experienced registered nurses into the homes of mothers whose babies are at risk of death or serious illness because of problems such as poverty, domestic violence, and drugs.

The nurses, who are available around the clock for two years, provide health care and child-rearing education, along with supplies such as food, blankets, and diapers. They also screen all mothers for depression.

The organization, which now operates in both Missouri and Tennessee, provided services to almost 4,000 families in 2006.

It says not one of the infants visited by its nurses last year had a substantiated report of abuse or neglect during the first year of life, just 1 percent were rehospitalized for preventable causes, and 90 percent were completely immunized by the time they were six months old.