An Expert on Boomers, In His Prime

Author and nonprofit leader has devoted his career to changing the way people think about retirement

Marc Freedman estimates he’s traveled two million miles in the last 15 years as part of his quest to change

the way people think about aging and retirement.

Suddenly, his passion is a hot topic. “When you go through the airports like I’ve been doing a lot lately and go to the newsstands, it’s kind of screaming out,” Mr. Freedman says. The most recent example: a Newsweek cover blaring, “Ready or Not, Boomers Turn 60.”

Mr. Freedman wrote a book in 1999, Prime Time: How Baby Boomers Will Revolutionize Retirement and Transform America. Today, with the oldest boomers set to turn 60 in January, everyone from market researchers to professors to government officials to corporate leaders are trying to figure out how this generation will live out their later years.

In the nonprofit and foundation world, people look to Mr. Freedman for answers.

“I talk sometimes about having brilliance envy,” says Andrea Taylor, director of training at the Temple University Center for Intergenerational Learning in Philadelphia. “When I say that, I often think about Marc. Not only did he see what was coming, he’s so incredibly articulate. He’s done more than any one person to change the conversation, to change the face of retirement.”

Spreading Ideas

Mr. Freedman is founder and president of Civic Ventures, in San Francisco, a nonprofit group that promotes policies and programs that encourage older adults to help fight social problems.

He also helped to found Experience Corps, a program that recruits older people to tutor and serve as mentors to inner-city schoolchildren that is now run by Civic Ventures.

Mr. Freedman is often asked to speak at conferences and to advise nonprofit groups and foundations, and he is frequently quoted in articles in major publications about the changing face of retirement.

“We say if we could only clone Marc Freedman, we could do so much more,” says Carol A. Farquhar, executive director of Grantmakers In Aging, in Dayton, Ohio, a group of foundations that give money to programs that focus on older people.

Mr. Freedman’s main thesis is this: Because of longer life spans, the old concept of retirement as a time to relax and basically withdraw from society is outmoded. And America needs desperately to come up with a new model, especially with the huge wave of baby boomers who are nearing traditional retirement age.

“There really is this new stage of life that is emerging between midlife and true old age,” he says. “It was sort of hidden for a long period of time because that period was not that long. So it kind of worked for people to kick back, take a rest. For some people [today], it can be 30 years, it can be as long as midlife. That approach doesn’t work well for most people psychologically, financially, and it certainly doesn’t work well for society.”

And the message for nonprofit groups? “There’s an opportunity to redefine what constitutes success in this stage of life,” he says. “If people can start thinking that this is a second chance to make a social contribution and the nonprofit sector is the place to do it, that could be an absolute windfall of talent for the sector.”

Working With Young People

Mr. Freedman, who lives in San Francisco with his wife, Leslie Gray, and newborn son, Gabriel, speaks with such passion that it is easy to assume he was motivated by his own frustrating experiences with retirement. However, he is only 47, and admits he is a little surprised to be devoting his life to new retirement models. “I never would have anticipated I would end up working on these particular issues,” says Mr. Freedman, who graduated from Swarthmore College with a degree in sociology and anthropology and earned an MBA from Yale University’s School of Management.

He explains that his interest in older Americans evolved from his stint from 1984 to 1997 as vice president of Public/Private Ventures, a nonprofit group that promotes policies and programs to help young people.

“I was very focused on the issue of human resources for kids and the idea that we weren’t paying sufficient attention to that aspect of youth programs and education, that we were so much more focused on those things that were more easily controlled, like the curriculum,” he says. “This human element, which was much trickier and elusive, I was convinced was the most important of all. So that just led inexorably to this question of, where are the human beings to do those things only human beings can do?”

Mr. Freedman was also influenced greatly by John Gardner, the philanthropic and government leader who died in 2002. He loves to point out that Mr. Gardner won the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964, at age 52, largely for his work as president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. “That’s supposed to be the apex, a lifetime achievement award,” he says. “And practically everything that we remember him for, he did after that point.”

That includes serving as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson, and founding Common Cause, the public-interest advocacy group, and Independent Sector, the coalition of charities and foundations.

In Prime Time, Mr. Freedman recalls approaching Mr. Gardner with trepidation at a conference in 1992 to tell him about a paper he had written on the role older Americans could play in helping young people. Mr. Gardner shocked him by pulling out of his briefcase a 1988 paper labeled “The Experience Corps,” calling for a new institution to unleash the talents of older Americans to revitalize civil society.

Mr. Freedman worked with Mr. Gardner and others to create Experience Corps, first conceived as a national-service program for older people along the lines of the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps. It started on a smaller scale, in 1995, as a pilot project to provide mentors to inner-city schoolchildren, managed by Public/Private Ventures and the federal Corporation for National Service.

In 1998, Mr. Freedman founded Civic Ventures to further develop Experience Corps — and turned to foundations for help. Civic Ventures has won grants from foundations including Atlantic Philanthropies, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

“In those days philanthropy didn’t even have aging issues on their scope,” says Tom Endres, a former head of senior programs at the Corporation for National Service who is now director of RespectAbility, a National Council on the Aging project to help nonprofit groups use the talents of older people. “One of Marc’s real contributions is that through his intellect and compassion around these issues, he has really gotten the philanthropic community moving in this direction.”

Next Chapter

Experience Corps now operates in 14 cities with more than 1,800 volunteers who serve as tutors and mentors to children in urban public schools and after-school programs, some earning a small stipend by working at least 15 hours a week, others volunteering for fewer hours or on short-term projects.

Civic Ventures, with a staff of about 20, including the Experience Corps employees in Washington, and a budget of $8 million, has since expanded to offer a service called Next Chapter.

The program offers counsel and other services to libraries, community colleges, cities, and other groups that are helping older adults plan the “second half of life” — for example, by offering continuing-education programs, life-planning sessions, clearinghouses for jobs and volunteer opportunities, or even cafes where older adults can gather.

Next Chapter projects, or those following similar principles, now exist in 13 states, Civic Ventures says.

Prime Time describes the genesis of Experience Corps, profiles several actively engaged older Americans, and offers a history of American attitudes toward retirement.

While the book — published by Public Affairs, a nonfiction publisher in New York — is highly readable and full of vivid characters, writing it was an ordeal for Mr. Freedman.

“I hated every minute of it,” he says. “I didn’t start writing the book until after it was actually due. When I was two chapters into the book, a friend called me up to inform me it was for sale on Amazon. In a moment of total sleep deprivation, because I was writing from 3 to 9 in the morning and then going to work, I thought maybe this is just a nightmare, maybe the book is actually done. Maybe I’ll just order it and it will show up with these chapters written.”

About 20,000 of the books have sold, Mr. Freedman says. Despite the trauma, he and his Civic Ventures colleagues plan to publish another book — although one that will not require as much writing.

The book will be called Still Working, a takeoff on Studs Terkel’s Working, and will offer first-person stories from older people who have shifted gears to “work for the greater good.”

“It’s people talking in an unromanticized way, telling the truth about what it’s like to try to find your footing in this new stage and to be a pioneer,” Mr. Freedman says. “It’s almost like if somebody was interviewing a lot of women who were moving into management roles in 1964, who had few role models.”

Some of the stories are already posted on the Civic Ventures Web site, including those of Carol Harris-Mannes, who earned a master’s degree in social work after 40 years of working for the entertainment industry and became a social worker; Tony Essaye, who retired from his law firm at age 68 and helped start the International Senior Lawyers Project, in Washington, to provide legal aid to developing countries; and Dave Miller, who took early retirement from a phone company and became director of operations at Crisis Assistance Ministry, a charity in Charlotte, N.C.

Mr. Freedman worries that despite the increased attention generated by the “boomers turning 60″ landmark, Americans are still not thinking big enough. In Prime Time, he proposed a “Third-Age Bill” along the lines of the G.I. Bill that helped integrate returning World War II veterans into society. He said Congress could create a fund to stimulate new approaches to engaging older Americans, a program to promote training projects for universities and nonprofit groups, and a report card on the effectiveness of U.S. efforts to tap the expertise of older people.

“There’s not any of the kind of creativity we marshaled earlier,” he says, pointing to programs such as Social Security and Medicare. “The nature of aging in this new stage of life is something of historic proportions. And the response so far has really been much more sort of fine tuning what we’ve already got.”

Now that he’s getting closer to age 50, Mr. Freedman says, he finds a new dimension to his work. “I realized I was not only trying to create better opportunities for these old people, but in fact, I was working to create the kinds of roles I would want to inhabit in not that long a period. Fifty-five is in view, I mean it’s eight years away. When I think of eight years back, it seems like yesterday.”