Make Room for Boomers

Charities look to engage a generation about to turn 60

When Chris Klose was 16, he was electrified by President John F. Kennedy’s famous appeal: “Ask not what

your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” In 1968 Mr. Klose followed through and joined the Peace Corps, serving two years in the Punjab region of northwest India helping farmers develop new varieties of wheat.

Mr. Klose later pursued a career in public relations, but he always dreamed of finding a way to reignite the passion he felt as a Peace Corps volunteer. “It was the transformative experience of my life, and I want to give back,” says Mr. Klose. “I’ve been thinking about it for 35 years.”

Now, at age 60, Mr. Klose is translating his dream into action. About two years ago, he and a longtime friend with whom he served in the Peace Corps, Jerr Boschee, founded a nonprofit group to recruit former Peace Corps volunteers for short-term overseas assignments.

The group, Peace Corps Encore, has signed up more than 600 potential volunteers, opened an office in Washington, and hired an executive director. It has also attracted foundation money — $150,000 from the UPS Foundation, which asked that at least 40 percent of the volunteers be 55 and older, and $25,000 from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Mr. Klose and Mr. Boschee are part of a growing effort in nonprofit and government circles to make community service — through paid jobs or volunteer work — a central part of the lives of the baby boomers as they reach their 60s and beyond. Proponents of getting the boomers involved in nonprofit activities say they hope to radically reshape the way society thinks about the graying of America. Instead of viewing older Americans exclusively as a drain on society who are going to bankrupt health-care and Social Security programs, they argue, they should be considered a tremendous asset that can be tapped to help solve social problems.

White House Conference

The movement has been percolating for the last decade, but it has exploded in recent months, thanks to the approach of a much-publicized milestone — January 1, 2006, the day the oldest baby boomers start turning 60. And it is likely to gain more momentum next month, at the White House Conference on Aging, which will unite 1,200 delegates from across the country to develop recommendations to influence national policy on aging over the next decade.

“Social engagement is crucial to the physical and psychological well-being of elderly citizens,” the agenda states. “It is an equally important way in which senior citizens can contribute to their communities.”

The boomers are getting so much attention in part because of the sheer size of the generation — more than 77 million people were born from 1946 to 1964. As they age, they will help double the number of Americans who are 65 and older from about 35 million today to more than 70 million in 2030. They are also better educated than their parents’ generation, and have longer life expectancies.

Like Mr. Klose, many Americans who came of age in the 1960s were influenced by President Kennedy’s call to service and by the era’s social activism, so they are expected to be responsive to appeals from charities.

And charities are likely to need workers more than ever — many of their leaders are themselves baby boomers and are expected to leave their jobs in the coming decade, either to retire or to try new opportunities in business, government, and elsewhere.

But the boomers are a fussy bunch, and charities need to learn how to accommodate them. They want positions where they can make a difference, research shows, and most nonprofit groups have not figured out how to offer them those kinds of opportunities, experts say.

David Eisner, chief executive of the Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal agency that operates the RSVP, Foster Grandparents, and Senior Companion programs for older volunteers, says his group knows “there are some hurdles in the way” when it comes to getting more older people linked with satisfying volunteer jobs. “One of the big ones is cultural, one of the big ones is operational, in the nonprofit sector,” he says.

Many charities, he says, have an outmoded view of volunteering, failing to recognize the value of putting people with years of experience in business, the professions, and government to work. “We have nonprofits that are used to thinking about hiring a consultant to develop a strategic plan, then bring the volunteers in to do the clerical work,” he says. “No one’s flipping it. People haven’t figured out how to bring the volunteer in to do the strategic plan, then hire at a lower cost the people to do the clerical work.”

A survey of more than 800 leaders and coordinators of volunteers at affiliates of 20 national nonprofit organizations released last spring confirmed Mr. Eisner’s views. While most charity leaders said they valued the potential contribution of older adults, few showed much interest in stepping up efforts to attract and retain them — partly because they were preoccupied with daily operational challenges and money problems.

“Developing strategies to tap the resources of older adults through paid and unpaid positions was beneath the radars of most local nonprofit officials,” says the March 2005 executive summary of the survey, which was conducted by the National Council on the Aging.

Sold-Out Events

Even so, signs of change are in the air.

Dick Goldberg, director of Coming of Age, a program in Philadelphia that promotes volunteering and community leadership for people age 50 and older, says that when he organized a conference for nonprofit leaders in April on “50-Plus Volunteering: the Wave of the Future,” 250 people showed up from as far away as Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and Washington, D.C. Since the auditorium only fit 200, some participants had to watch the plenary sessions on a television feed in a separate room.

In October, the program advertised a session with Ellen Freudenheim, an expert on retirement issues, to discuss “why boomers and recent retirees want to find work that makes a difference — and how to do that.” A headline on the Coming of Age Web site soon read: “November 14 Boomervision! session is SOLD OUT.”

“What we have found with everything we have initiated this past year is there are more people who want to be involved than we have room for,” Mr. Goldberg says.

Across the country, efforts are under way to figure out just what kinds of activities will attract boomers — and serve society. Among the efforts:

• The Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust, in Scottsdale, Ariz., awarded $1.6-million in grants this year to four collaborative efforts designed to link charities with older volunteers who have specific skills.

• In Chandler, Ariz., a Piper grant is being used at a public library to house a database that lists names of prospective volunteers and their skills. Charities can check the database to see if they can find specialized volunteer help.

  Another Piper-supported program, in Tempe, Ariz., will create a cafe in a library where would-be volunteers would meet with charity leaders. “The idea isn’t just to create a Starbucks for seniors, but to provide opportunities for people to work for their communities,” says Carol Kratz, a senior program officer at Piper.

• Eleven foundations have supported a program called Advant Age to survey the thoughts of older residents in 10 cities in hopes of having them take part in improving their localities. The Winter Park Health Foundation, in Winter Park, Fla., is using the surveys as a basis for a series of town meetings. In addition to making grants to link older adults with charities and with local children, the foundation has started a planning process with goals of making Orange County, Fla., more “elder friendly” and keeping older people busier and healthier, through furthering their education, working longer, or volunteering. The Grand Rapids Community Foundation is leading a similar effort in Kent County, Mich., as is the Cleveland Foundation in northeastern Ohio. The Cleveland Foundation has made grants totaling $1.5-million to centers where older people can continue their education.
• In hopes of spurring interest in the creative powers of older individuals, the Atlantic Philanthropies, in New York, and the John Templeton Foundation, in West Conshohocken, Pa., have provided money to Civic Ventures, a think tank in San Francisco that is focusing on ways to attract older Americans to social projects, so it can offer prizes of $100,000 each to five people age 60 or older annually.

The winners will be those who have come up with solutions to social problems — and they will not be people who typically get attention in the news media, says Jim Emerman, executive vice president of Civic Ventures.

“People like Jimmy Carter and Paul Newman won’t be eligible,” he says. “We want to identify people who have been transformative in the realm of community problem solving and inspire people who are entering this period of life.”

The foundations have provided enough money to create a $500,000 revolving fund to which award winners and finalists can apply to expand their work. The prize will be formally announced later this month, as will its selection committee, says Mr. Emerman. The first round of prizes will be handed out next June.

Seeking Models

Several organizations are working on national efforts to highlight projects and practices that can serve as models for other groups — including the National Council on the Aging, in Washington, a network of organizations that operate programs for older people. In 2003 the council started RespectAbility, a program to help nonprofit groups make better use of older Americans, with a $3.5-million grant from the Atlantic Philanthropies.

“Back then, this whole issue of aging, while it was being talked about by various groups, had not really become mainstream,” says Tom Endres, director of RespectAbility. “The first impetus was, what can we do to raise awareness and move from a state of awareness to acceptance?”

RespectAbility is now on a quest to find examples of organizations that have taken an innovative approach to engaging older adults — and to share their secrets with other charities. It will give awards of $10,000 apiece to 5 or 10 groups that have developed programs to give older adults meaningful roles that benefit others. The group has identified 34 semifinalists and will announce the winners next spring.

One of the semifinalists is the Executive Service Corps of Chicago, which, with a grant from the Retirement Research Foundation, also in Chicago, started a program about three years ago to recruit retired executives to coach executive directors of local nonprofit groups. The organization provides numerous executive services for nonprofit groups, but coaching is now the most-requested one, says Meg Herman, manager of the program.

“It’s lonely at the top,” she says. Nonprofit leaders “want a strategic thought partner whose interests aren’t threatened.” The group has about 30 active coaches, many of whom served as top executives at major businesses. Many have also served on nonprofit boards. Coaches get intensive training before they are matched with an executive director.

Only a few have not worked out, she says. Occasionally, a high-powered former executive finds it is difficult to be a “sage on the side” rather than a “star on the stage,” she says.

Next Generation

The Corporation for National and Community Service is also offering incentives to nonprofit groups that develop new ways to engage older volunteers. In September it awarded $1.5-million in grants for what it called the “next generation” of national-service programs, including those trying innovative ways to attract baby boomers.

Big Brothers Big Sisters of El Paso won $207,500 through the grant program. Beth Senger, the group’s chief executive, says the charity is setting up a program to recruit baby boomers to help the organization in new ways. While Big Brothers Big Sisters traditionally recruits young adults to act as “buddies” to children, and older volunteers to serve as mentors in schools, the El Paso affiliate now hopes to attract people who may be looking for something that involves less commitment — for example, auditing financial records or consulting on information technology, with the option of working from home, Ms. Senger says.

“The assumption is that people in this age bracket are professionals in their field, they’re at a place in their lives where they’ve learned a lot,” she says. “Why are we dictating to them what we want when they probably have wonderful ideas about how they can help?”

While the corporation’s effort to identify “next generation” approaches has been met with applause in the nonprofit world, some advocates for older Americans hope that the government will consider doing more.

Some groups have suggested that the White House Conference on Aging recommend measures such as tax credits for training to prepare people for volunteer work or for older people who volunteer significant amounts of time.

However, Richard Harwood, president of the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, in Bethesda, Md., recently told a Grantmakers In Aging conference that he opposes attempts to “monetize” the public good by offering financial incentives for civic engagement. “You can’t pay people for these things,” he said. “They have to come from within us.”

Mr. Harwood has just published a book, Hope Unraveled: The People’s Retreat and Our Way Back, which argues that Americans have retreated from public and political life because they are disenchanted with rampant consumerism, negative campaigning, and sensationalism in the news media. That could get in the way of efforts to get the boomers involved in community service, he says. “We need to develop ways to connect with one another within communities and across communities,” he says.

Economic Factors

Plenty of other obstacles abound to getting the boomers to volunteer. Nearly 7 in 10 American workers plan to continue working full or part time after they retire from their main job, many for economic reasons, according to a Rutgers University study.

A report on civic engagement and baby boomers published last year by the Harvard School of Public Health and the MetLife Foundation noted that boomers are less devoted to community service than their parents, or the “Greatest Generation” — they vote less, read newspapers less, and are less apt to join churches or civic organizations — and may need a big push.

But Jay Winsten, co-director of the Harvard/MetLife project on civic engagement, says that even a small percentage of baby boomers could make a big difference. “Although there are 77 million baby boomers, we don’t need to attract all of them to civic engagement,” he says. Even if only 10 percent of them heeded the call, “it could have an amazing impact.”

Michael Anft contributed to this article.