THE SPECIAL SKILLS OF OLDER FOLKS
You would think that my own muscle memory would serve me well, when at age sixty I stepped away from keeping school to become an associate with the Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford. In what social entrepreneurs call “field building,” my assignment was to figure out how aging Boomers could “give back” in the years we used to call retirement. That was the plan. Over time, however, I would come to realize that my muscle memory would become as much a hindrance as an asset.
At the outset of my research, the prospects were good. According to surveys taken at the time, seventy-five percent of us indicated a predisposition to give back, however that might be defined. Yet, it came with a catch: we would do it our way and on our own terms. That is, we would only work at it part-time, flex-time, our own time and within a fifteen to twenty mile radius of our homes (It’s called “aging in place”). And that’s not all: in return, we expected a good dose of meaning, purpose and in some cases financial remuneration. No surprise here—Boomers being Boomers.
This presented me with a conundrum that I would puzzle over for more than a decade. I had no flash of insight. No muse would come calling. My creative juices went dry. So, I did what an earnest and persevering sixty-year old would do: I would feel my way, over time, eventually to a solution. I networked. I interviewed thought leaders, social entrepreneurs and practitioners. I went down a lot of blind alleys. The cumulative effect of this journey served at least one useful purpose, however. I was learning how to make a useful map of an unproductive system.
Marc Freedman, the founder of encore.org and our leading thought leader, would deftly explain why: re-purposing is “a do-it-yourself project.” Not only that, “There is an absence of coherent institutions” to receive us. Moreover, “The intervening space is not just wide—it’s confusing and chaotic.” Our team came to a similar conclusion: re-purposing is a bridge to nowhere in particular. In mapping the repurposing terrain, we discovered no shortage of gaps.
My second set of mapmaking activities revolved around what Marc Freedman calls “bringing the generations together for mutual benefit” (and what later encore.org would brand as “Gen2Gen”). In his more than two decades of travels in this space, he’s met a multitude of innovators, whom he divides up into “inventors, infiltrators and the integrators.”
The inventors are “dreaming up radical new ideas” such as small intergenerational and intentional communities. The integrators bring together age-segregated institutions such as senior centers with preschools. To my mind, these innovations seemed to be overly ambitious—and attainable only on some distant shore.
The most accessible innovations, however, are the work infiltrators. They are the ones who go about “injecting older or younger people into settings where you might not have expected them, such as in colleges and universities.” This includes Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative and Stanford’s Distinguished Careers Institute, where older persons get to design their own encore careers and partake fully in the stimulation of campus intellectual and social life.
Perhaps the most notable infiltrators are “encore fellows,” who embed themselves in nonprofits and municipal governments, usually for a year. Mostly retirees in their fifties and sixties, these fellows provide their host organizations with the expertise that they may lack; and in return, the fellows are better positioned to launch their own “encore careers.” I should know. I was able to serve as an encore fellow in the Mayor’s Office in San José.
There is a fourth kind of innovator: those who advocate for social change. One of the most prominent is the World Health Organization’s and AARP’s Age Friendly movement, which supports communities, states and universities in drawing up blueprints to make them more responsive to the world’s changing demographics. With 10,000 Boomers turning 65 every day and a declining birth rate, our cities need to take into account the needs of older persons, ranging from wheelchair access and transportation to social connectivity, lifelong learning and volunteer and employment opportunities. And, of course, there is encore.org itself, which for more than two decades has served as a laboratory and clearing house for the most promising ideas in the arena of older American’s civic engagement.
Designing a New App. What had eluded me all these years had been sitting right under my nose all along. And it all came together in the last few months of my Encore Fellowship in San José, where I was building a mentoring program for underserved high school age youth.
It took the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 to be the catalyst. Sheltering at home had forced me to move online, and once I had moved there I happened upon an unexpected innovation. Zoom and Google Hangouts, it turns out, are very well suited for mentoring. I soon discovered that mentoring remotely could be as good, if not better than getting together in person.
First and foremost, video teleconferencing as a medium solves nearly all the insurmountable logistical hurdles of getting mentors and mentees together in the same place at a time convenient for each other. In addition, I quickly came to the realization that working online could break down the cumbersome administrative tasks of recruiting, orienting and screening potential mentors and mentees.
The group-oriented approach itself brings a number of benefits. It’s conducive to holding the attention of young people, whether in a large group or in breakout group settings, especially when you can embed relevant videos and interactive surveys into a session—all in real time. It also enables mentors and mentees the opportunity to get to know one another well enough to establish a strong foundation of trust. Once this trust is established, group gatherings could go on indefinitely, lasting an entire school year or to the point where individual matches for one-on-one mentoring could be made.
The creative process in coming up with this design is noteworthy. I was extremely fortunate in being able to team up with a sidekick who is a technology native and much closer in age to the young people we’re serving. I brought my muscle memory to our deliberations; my Millennial partner brought his flashes of insight. I brought “creativity, slow.” He brought “creativity, fast.”
As encouraging as these developments were, I was presented with another major problem. I worried that the design we created would not outlast my year-long encore fellowship. I needed at least one champion to keep it going. This would be a challenge in the best of times, but now the city of San José was facing the most daunting fiscal crisis in its history. The resulting budget shortfall would gut the host organization, San José Works, and its summer job internship program, potentially withdrawing support for my efforts.
It was then that another idea crystallized in my mind. Why not create a team of older persons like me to lead and administer the program going forward. After all, there’s a lot of older talent in the city of San José and in Santa Clara County seeking to give back, just waiting to be recruited. Individual members of the team could work part-time, flex-time, their own time within a radius of 15-20 miles from their homes. All team members would find their share of meaning and purpose. And, presumably a team leader might be able to secure a modest stipend.
There it is: the solution to the conundrum that had bedeviled me since my days with the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship.
First, let’s create a leadership team, consisting of any number of retired and semi-retired researchers and practitioners, pediatricians and social workers, teachers, school administrators, curriculum specialists and counselors, whoever can bring their experience to bear on the health and wellbeing of our youth. The team could also draw upon those with business and organizational experience. Call it a steering committee or even an “action tank,” that is, a think tank that mobilizes others.
Then, let’s enlist another mix of adults who are still in the workforce, whose volunteer time is even more limited, such as “mid-lifers” and younger folks such as college and high school students (Let’s call them “near peers”). Let’s call them implementation teams.
The leadership team plans and leads. The implementation team carries out the plan. That’s the design. Is it desirable? Yes. Is it feasible? Yes. And, is it viable? Of course! Moreover, this team design can apply to any kind of issue, from climate change to opioid abuse and racial injustice.
To be most effective, the leadership team needs to be trained in the “physics of change.” That is, team members need to recognize the unproductive systemic forces that trap our youths’ potential, identify the channels through which these negative systemic forces travel and decide upon the most effective leverage points for facilitating positive change. Team members need to be steeped in the “three essential variables” of changemaking. In addition, the leadership team needs to be well versed in the three major planning tasks, which invariably draws upon making the map of an unproductive system and minding the gaps within it in order to build an effective app.
Both the leadership and implementation teams would also need to be trained on which approaches—direct, indirect and/or group—would be most beneficial in addressing a particular problem. In the fields of education and youth development, for example, an indirect approach would involve changing a particularly problematic situation a young person may be subjected to (such as gang participation). A direct approach would involve classroom projects to learn about growth mindsets, values and a young person’s sense of belonging. And, a group approach might very well involve studying in teams or the group mentoring program I and my younger colleague have designed.
And finally, the leadership and implementation teams could then train the mentors themselves to be changemakers.