September 6, 2007 | Read Time: 9 minutes
When David Buck, 47, was laid off from his real-estate-development job more than a year ago here, he had a vague yearning to do something more meaningful. He’d been wondering for a few years, “Is this going to be my legacy, to leave a few buildings on this earth?”
Instead of looking for a new job right away, Mr. Buck decided to take a break and explore ways to reshape the rest of his career. Within a few months he had found his mission — creating an organization to help people like himself.
“As I went through the process of discovering what I really want to do with the next half of my life, I gradually realized that everyone’s going through the same thing,” he says. Many people in midlife, especially baby boomers, want to find work with more purpose, he says — and are looking for guidance on how to make the transition.
Today Mr. Buck is the executive director of an embryonic, but thriving, nonprofit group called Shift, which offers both inspiration and practical help to people in the Twin Cities area. He created the group with Jan Hively, 75, a Minnesota educator and advocate for older adults.
“There’s a lot of unrest in the boomer generation,” she told Mr. Buck when she met him. “And, David, you’re just one of many.”
Starting last November, Shift began holding weekly meetings on Monday evenings at the Dunn Bros Coffee Shop, overlooking the city’s Loring Park, as a way to give people a chance to hear speakers in a relaxed setting.
With minimal publicity, about 40 people showed up for the first session, which included presentations from a toy designer turned politician, an electrician turned English professor, and a book and record distributor turned elementary-school teacher.
Subsequent meetings — featuring nonprofit leaders, educators, head hunters, financial planners, and entrepreneurs discussing ways to find purpose in work — drew even more people. The record is about 80, with newcomers making up one-fourth to one-third of the participants each time. “It was very clear within the first couple of weeks that we struck a nerve,” Ms. Hively says. “People came in starving.”
‘That 50 Thing’
Brent Casey was among those who showed up in Shift’s early days. Mr. Casey decided to leave a career as a self-employed photo stylist — setting up photo shoots for advertisers such as department stores — last October, shortly after he turned 50, and take his life in a new direction.
“I was thinking not of a ‘legacy’ legacy, but leaving the planet in a better place than when I arrived,” he says. “It’s that 50 thing. You’re kind of looking at the last third or whatever portion it is of your life. And I don’t have kids, so it wasn’t like I produced an Albert Einstein or a couple of kids that were going to save the world or something.”
Mr. Casey tried a job-transition group at a church, but found it disappointing.
“Everybody just gets together and complains: ‘I was downsized, and how could they fire me?’ Then somebody wants to tell you a worse scenario. So it’s really depressing to go,” he says. But he learned about Shift from that group, and soon became a regular participant. He is exploring ways to shape a new career that could bring together his interests in international travel, the arts, children, and older people.
Providing Mentors
Since its first coffee house gathering, Shift has developed ambitious plans for becoming part of the nationwide movement that is encouraging baby boomers and other older adults to use their skills to do good. It has a 12-member board that is headed by Sharon Roe Anderson, a leadership consultant, and includes experts in fund raising, marketing, and aging issues. In May, Shift was designated a tax-exempt charity by the Internal Revenue Service.
The group now offers “Shift circles,” small groups where people discuss their desire for career change; and “Shift-Mates,” a mentorship program for new members. It has set up several “affinity groups” for people who are interested in particular job areas, such as health care, the environment, and entrepreneurship — and is working to set up internships with employers in those fields.
The group agreed in August that Ms. Hively would start offering Shift workshops for employers on how to create a work environment to attract and retain older workers.
Shift is also exploring partnerships with other groups including the Citizens League, the Minneapolis Community and Technical College, the Minnesota Career Development Association, the University of St. Thomas, and the Walker Art Center. It also plans to post a directory of resources on its Web site.
Like many fledgling nonprofit groups, however, Shift does not yet have much money. It passes the hat at the weekly meetings, charges $10 a session for the Shift circles, and will charge for future workshops. It has received a couple of $5,000 donations from individuals.
And it has started the hard work of applying for grants. Shift has submitted applications to several regional and national foundations, stressing that it can “tap into the vast reservoir of social capital represented by people at midlife.”
In July, Shift achieved a breakthrough when it found its first corporate sponsor — Transamerica Retirement Management, in St. Paul, a new division of Aegon, the life-insurance and pension company. The company, which was set up to help people plan financially for their retirement years, saw Shift as a natural partner.
Both are “nascent organizations” that are helping people make a life transition, says Mark Foster, a company vice president. “Our clients need transitional help and coaching, and Shift could potentially be a network for them.”
In exchange for $7,500, Shift has agreed to publicize Transamerica to its participants.
As the organization waits for other money to come in, Mr. Buck serves as executive director on a volunteer basis, while his wife, Jenny, is the breadwinner for the couple and their two children, ages 10 and 11.
Other volunteers are learning new skills so they can help the group grow. For example, Pamela Lund, 62, a former securities analyst, agreed to head the development committee and write the grant proposals. She heard about Shift while she was thinking of starting a magazine, or television or radio show, for baby boomers.
At first, she mainly wanted to help the organization get off the ground. But she eventually discovered that it could help her decide her own career future, which she hopes will be a departure from the finance world.
“It was a very good job. I learned a lot. I love looking at new innovative companies,” she says. “What I don’t love is the value system that underpins it.”
Earth Corps
While Shift plots its future, participants continue to show up at the coffee house each week looking for camaraderie, contacts, and inspiration from speakers who tell stories about their own midcareer “shifts.”
Eric Utne, the founder of Utne Reader magazine, in Minneapolis, attended a recent session during which he described a new group he is helping to start, the Earth Corps for Global Service.
The goal is to line up volunteers and workers to help humanitarian, environmental, development, and other organizations work on pressing global problems such as climate change, groundwater depletion, avian flu, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons and small arms.
Mr. Utne, who is working on the project with Carol Bellamy, former director of the Peace Corps, told the audience that the idea gelled after he heard a speaker at a conference about a year and a half ago catalog all the global crises that would converge over the next 10 or 20 years.
“To my surprise, instead of getting flattened, I came away inspired,” he says. “I realized, I just turned 60. I still have my energy and my health. People still answer my phone calls, for the most part, and I’ve got to do something about this.”
At the same meeting, people in the audience of about 70 were asked to say which global issue they would most like to tackle themselves.
Among the answers: promoting the spread of organic agriculture and “voluntary simplicity,” helping children in developing countries, expanding the availability of low-cost housing, fighting human-rights violations, protecting marine and wildlife, and increasing literacy rates.
Baby Boomers
Observing the people who are drawn to Shift from her perch as someone who lived through World War II, Ms. Hively concludes that baby boomers — that tidal wave of people born from 1946 to 1964 — are different from her generation.
Ms. Hively, who serves as Shift’s board secretary, is a former Minneapolis deputy mayor who started a nonprofit group affiliated with the University of Minnesota called the Vital Aging Network. She now teaches courses at the university on issues such as “lifework after retirement” and “education for midlife and beyond.”
“A lot of us in my generation were doing what people told us we should be doing,” she says. “Boomers are much more likely to be thinking for themselves.”
While people in her age group were likely to stick with a job they hated until retirement, she says, boomers are more likely to seek fulfillment in their careers — especially since they expect to be in the work force much longer than their parents.
She says many people come to Shift because they are demoralized by the insecure nature of the modern world of work — the “downsizings,” the buyouts, the end of secure pensions.
“So many people are feeling overworked,” she says. “In the last couple of weeks there have been people coming [to Shift] just waiting for the ax to fall.”
But such feelings are not limited to baby boomers, says Kristin Kopp, who has been attending Shift meetings since she saw an article about the group in the Minneapolis Star Tribune last February.
She is still in her mid 30s, but she loves hearing from people who have made, or hope to make, a “shift” in their lives — something she did herself more than a year ago, when she left a job as a flight attendant and started a company to provide help to older people so they can continue to live in their homes.
“Even though people say this group is for baby boomers, who are kind of retiring and want a different focus in life, I can’t tell you how many of my friends are going through the exact same struggles,” she says.
She adds:”I refer Shift to so many people every week who say, ‘I am in a dead-end job, I find no meaning in my work, I have no passion for what’s going on in my life.’ I don’t think it’s necessarily an age limitation. It’s really more a societal issue.”
