‘Seasoned Warriors’ Urged to Use Their Skills to Benefit Society

CONFERENCE NOTEBOOK

The Purpose Prize Innovation Summit that took place here this month had a lofty goal — to start a new movement of older people to tear down stereotypes about aging and redefine retirement as a time to work for the public good.

“You can leave [here] to be at the forefront of pushing societal changes,” Marc Freedman, president of Civic Ventures, a nonprofit group in San Francisco that co-sponsored the conference with Stanford University’s Center for Social Innovation, told the participants, many of whom were charity leaders over age 60.

W. Wilson Goode Sr., the former mayor of Philadelphia, put it in more colorful terms. The group of experienced people gathered in Palo Alto, he said, were a “new posse of seasoned warriors.”

“We have a unique opportunity to bring new ideas to entrenched problems that cost the lives of millions of people each and every year,” he said. Mr. Goode was fresh from winning one of five $100,000 “Purpose Prizes” — a new award for Americans age 60 or older who are tackling society’s problems in an innovative way. He won for his work as director of Amachi, a program that provides mentors to children of incarcerated parents.

The Purpose Prize is run by Civic Ventures, a think tank that promotes projects to tap the expertise of older people, with money from two foundations, the Atlantic Philanthropies, in New York, and the John Templeton Foundation, in West Conshohocken, Pa.

More than 100 people attended the Palo Alto meeting, including all of the Purpose Prize winners, most of the 10 additional finalists, who won $10,000 each, and many of the 56 nominees who did not win awards but were dubbed Purpose Prize Fellows.

Over three days of meetings on the Stanford University campus, the participants shared their experiences and brainstormed about ways to use the Purpose Prize program to further their work and entice others to follow their example.

Speakers encouraged the participants to think big. “You’re part of something very historic,” said Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor of business administration at Harvard University and author of Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End and other books about leadership. “It doesn’t come along very often, and that’s the chance to invent a new stage of life.”

In the belief that every movement needs key messages, conference participants spent time trying to craft catch phrases worthy of Madison Avenue. Chip Heath, a Stanford professor of organizational behavior, shared his formula for making ideas stick: simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional stories.

He asked participants to produce messages to sell the idea that the huge wave of baby boomers who are beginning to enter the traditional retirement years can work to benefit society. The result was a bevy of slogans.

Some stressed meaning: “You can make a difference. We did it.” “Some people say we’re old enough to know better. We say we’re old enough to do better.”

Some stressed second chances: “Once more with feeling.” “Not the end, but the beginning.”

Some stressed wisdom: “Everything’s possible again, but now you know how to do it.” “Sixty years of experience is a terrible thing to waste.”

Some played with words: “Remember the Sixties.” “Grow old bold.”

And one got big laughs: “Don’t trust anyone under 60.”

Despite the clever wordsmithing, Mr. Heath — who said he was known as a tough grader — gave the results a C-plus. He said the slogans were not concrete enough.

He urged the audience to look beyond Madison Avenue and study the success of urban legends, those mythical tales that circulate widely without the help of marketing campaigns — bolstered by details that give them a ring of authenticity. For example, he said, the claim that people use only 10 percent of their brains is entirely bogus, but widely believed, partly because “10 percent” sounds so concrete.

The Purpose Prize fellows should use their own powerful life stories to enhance their pitches for a new movement, said Mr. Heath, co-author of a book that will be published in January, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. “I was humbled at what you all have accomplished,” he said.

Sherry Lansing, the former chief of Paramount Pictures, who headed the panel that selected the Purpose Prizes winners, said she was amazed that the award received more than 1,200 nominations in its first year. “We thought we’d be lucky if we got 100 applications,” she told the audience.

Ms. Lansing, who is now chief executive of her own foundation, recalled that she became involved with the prize program after Arianna Huffington, the columnist and author, nagged her to contribute a piece to her blog, the Huffington Post.

Ms. Lansing wrote a short item last year, titled “Rewirednot Retired,” proposing that retired people work as public-school teachers. “Marc Freedman blogged me back,” she said. “He said, ‘We’re already doing this.’” (Civic Ventures, headed by Mr. Freedman, operates Experience Corps, a program that places older people in urban public schools as mentors and tutors.)

Ms. Lansing said she then read Mr. Freedman’s book, Prime Time: How Baby Boomers Will Revolutionize Retirement and Transform America, and distributed it to all of her friends.

Ms. Lansing, whose foundation focuses primarily on cancer research — said her own values had changed with age. “Suddenly, at 60, I wanted to give back more than I wanted to make movies.”

Early indicators suggest that the Purpose Prize is starting to have its intended effect of inspiring people like Ms. Lansing to act on their desires to serve society.

One of the Purpose Prize $10,000 finalists, Robert Chambers, 62, reported that news coverage of his award — given for his work starting a charity to provide low-interest loans and financial counseling to help poor people buy cars — prompted more than 45 people to contact him to say they wanted to do something similar. Mr. Chambers, of Lebanon, N.H., said that about half of the people are retired, including one person who told him: “I’m tired of playing golf.”

Mr. Chambers said he plans to apply for money from the $1- million Fund for Innovation, set up to provide grants to Purpose Prize finalists, so that his group, Bonnie CLAC (Car Loans and Counseling), can hire consultants to help it expand across the country.

Other winners reported similar experiences.

“It’s amazing how something like this changes your life,” said Conchy Bretos, of Miami Beach, who operates the only for-profit organization that received a Purpose Prize. “I was an unknown quantity. Now everyone wants to talk to me, meet with me, pick my brain.”

She said she plans to plow the $100,000 she won back into her company, the MIA Consulting Group, which works with local and state housing authorities to provide assisted-living services to public-housing residents.

The timing is good, she said, because her company is now working with the federal Departments of Health and Human Services and Housing and Urban Development on an assisted-living project in Little Rock, Ark., that might be a model for future efforts.

Charles Dey, of Lyme, Conn., who started a program for the National Organization on Disability to provide job training to high-school students with disabilities, said he will give the money to the organization to bring the program to new urban areas and to support a new project at the organization — National EmployAbility Partnership, which is developing an education and employment program for injured veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Marilyn Hughes Gaston and Gayle Porter, of Bethesda, Md., who created Prime Time Sister Circles, a program of support groups to help black women improve their health, will use the money to meet growing demand for their services, fueled partly by publicity about the Purpose Prize. They are now working to get a training institute for group leaders off the ground and would like to work with national black-women’s organizations to expand their program nationwide, said Dr. Gaston.

Mr. Goode of Amachi said he will use the money to finance his dream of getting states to devote one-half of 1 percent of their corrections budgets on programs to provide mentors for children of prisoners.

“I’m going to use the dollars to go around the country and meet the governors and other people to get a dedicated funding source in every single state for this purpose,” he said.