Happy Holidays to all our One Year for Cancer supporters!  Enjoy this time with your friends and family!

Love, Ellie

From left, Charles F. Bolden Jr., Hans Ulrich Maerki, Vivian Lowery Derryck, Susan Leal and Charles R. Denham.

Starting Over, With a Second Career Goal of Changing Society

The link above is an article from this Saturday’s New York Times.  It was written by Steve Lohr (Lohr@nytimes.com) and it outlines a new initiative by Harvard University that is a “small but ambitious experiment … that [Harvard} hopes will become a new “third stage” of university education. For the student-fellows in the program, most in their 50s and early 60s, the goal is a second-act career in a new stage of life.” 

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the article quotes Marc Freedman, an author I’ve read before in conjunction with OYFC research.  I guess it is a small world afterall!  There actually is a following for ideas like ours!  Freedman’s blog is super interesting for baby boomers getting ready for or dealing with retirement, and his book, Encore; Finding Work that Matters In The Second Half of Life, offers interesting insight on the concept of “encore” careers (retirees choosing a more “feel good” organization to work for after putting in a lifetime of work for “the man”).  There is quite a following, and after seeing this article, it gives me hope that the baby boomers really are a great market for One Year for Cancer.  We can place these recent retirees (like the fellows mentioned in this article) in great jobs in the cancer industry.  They can lend their years of expertise, passion, and experience to a worthwhile cause and feel great about it.   We’ll provide them an outlet.  

Here are some interesting excerpts from the article (which I really really suggest you read to get the full concept!) 

“This is about deploying a leadership force to have an impact on major social problems,” said Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at the Harvard Business School who heads the program. “We want to make the case to the world that experience matters.”

“The Harvard experiment is part of a larger effort to help find productive “next” careers for a coming flood of retiring baby boomers — more than 75 million people born from 1946 to 1964. Many of them resist the traditional retirement ideal of leisure and travel.

Indeed, more than five million Americans who are 44 to 70 are already engaged in a stage of work after their first careers that has a social impact, mainly in education, health care, government and other nonprofit organizations, according to a survey this year by Peter D. Hart Research Associates.

Such later-in-life, second acts have been called “encore careers,” “postcareers” and “engaged retirement.” No matter the name, the concept seems to have considerable appeal, encouraged by celebrity role models like Bill Gates and Bill Clinton.

Half of Americans age 50 to 70 want to find work that has a social impact after their primary career ends, according to a poll by Princeton Survey Research Associates.”

If you want to help (and I REALLY hope you do!!), please do so by helping us connect with these impressive individuals.  Reach out to those you know and use the power of the six degrees of separation.  Who do you know that can lead us to these people?  OYFC can be a valuable resource for them, helping them to connect with the cancer organizations who need their expertise, and they can help us immensely as well.  These 14 fellows can act as spokespeople for our organization, helping us gain traction, clout, and funding.

If you have a connection to the program or to any of these individuals, please contact me to let me know.  If not, no worries!  I will be contacting them on behalf of OYFC and so should you.  Please let me know if you’d like some guidance about what to write and where to send your correspondence (when I figure it out for myself!).

Thank you in advance for your help!

NOTE: In the “Comments” section of this post I have posted a letter I sent to Steve Lohr, the author of this article.  If you feel inclined to contact him or any of the others mentioned in this article, please feel free to copy the letter to send on your own or adapt it in any way you see fit!