Age of Innovation

20 Good Years...

…Is about all buddies John Lowry and Stanley Friedman figure they have left, prompting them to “live each and every day as if it is their last.” That’s the premise of a new comedy set to appear on NBC this fall, according to the industry trade rags.

It will be interesting to see how John Lithgow ("3rd Rock from the Sun") and Jeffrey Tambor ("Arrested Development") manage to “make the most of their impending golden years.” It would be a real step forward if the two guys do more than take road trips and try to get laid – not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Jerry Seinfeld used to say.

How about helping schoolchildren learn to read in an Experience Corps project, or getting an inner-city teaching job through one of the alternative credentialing programs? Or they could put their earlier experience to work helping run a health clinic, food bank, homeless shelter or other non-profit organization. Or, if they wanted to take that road trip after all, they could go to the Gulf Coast to help Habitat for Humanity rebuild houses, or go to Africa to help train health workers fight AIDS.

Come to think of it, let’s help out producers Michael Leeson ("Cosby Show") and Marsh McCall ("Just Shoot Me," "Modern Men") by thinking up some good plot lines for John and Stanley. If we can get some ideas going here, we’ll get them in front of the right people.

--David Bank

Ms. Smith Goes to Washington

Pam Smith scored a touchdown at today’s hearing before the Senate Special Committee on Aging, and not just because she’s the mother of San Francisco 49ers quarterback Alex Smith.

The hearing, titled "Innovation in the Aging Network," was intended to explore the future of social services for older Americans. Ms. Smith helped reframe the discussion by talking about social services by older Americans.

According to Elizabeth Fox, senior advisor to Experience Corps, Ms. Smith’s testimony helped get Sen. Gordon Smith, Republican from Oregon (and no relation) interested in encouraging civic engagement and intergenerational projects through the Older Americans Act, which is up for reauthorization. Tom Endres, of the National Council on Aging, said Ms. Smith’s testimony was among the most effective he had ever heard.

Experience Corps’ Jeremy Cluchey attended the hearing and filed this account:

The final witness, Pam Smith, was far and away the most engaging and effective, and not just because her son is the 49ers’ new quarterback.  She sounded Marc (Freedman)’s clarion call that it’s possible to harness the force of the retiring Boomers for the public good, noting that the average American spend 25% of his/her life in retirement now, and that it’s not always easy to do that successfully. Successful retirement requires not only physical and mental acuity and health, but also meaning and purpose, she said. Obesity, depression, and diabetes are major and disproportionate problems afflicting older adults, she noted.

Smith infused her testimony with several compelling anecdotes which illustrated the effectives of the programs in San Diego County. She described San Pasqual Academy, where they rented housing at low cost to older adults on the same campus as displaced youth, with one requirement -- “care about these kids.”  She described the dramatic effects, including a 90% graduation rate and high college attendance among a group that more often than not does not get out of grade school.

She talked about “an army of older adults” working with pre-schoolers in another program, and how those kids were substantially better prepared for school than their counterparts according to teachers and parents.  She concluded with another powerful anecdote about a man who played chess with high school kids, and noted the importance of pairing older adults with organizations in relationships that are fulfilling to both parties.

--David Bank

Letter from Charlottesville

In working with local organizations to create spaces where older adults can start planning their "next chapter," Civic Ventures has generally avoided traditional "senior centers," which were established in an earlier time for an earlier generation. Libraries and community colleges have been seen as more appealing locales for the current cohort of 50- and 60-somethings.

But in some places, innovative local leaders have turned traditional senior centers on their heads and turned them into hotbeds of community involvement. Dawn, from Virginia, wrote us recently about such an effort in Charlottesville, one of two Next Chapter sites that are indeed organized around senior centers.

"My interest in the aging process is at least in part personal," Dawn writes. " I am 69 & belong to a very forward looking Senior Center which is so great that I now have as a personal mission to try to sell government on the idea that, by utilizing Senior talent in enterprises & volunteer work, we not only enable Seniors to define themselves as old at a much later age, & improve the quality of their lives by empowering them to remain in control of their lives, but we could save the government billions in Medicare costs.  This to me is a far better use of energy than adding more perks for Seniors to Medicare.

"I personally work about 60 hours a month both in our Center & in the community, & love every minute of it. But at least on a local level, our Senior Center is regarded as a poor relation because we don't take a cent from govt, & empower seniors rather
than victimizing them to get yet another hand out.  60% of the work in our center is done by senior volunteers, & our Seniors volunteer at 100 different places in the community.  But nobody is using us as a model!  Maybe Civic Ventures is having the same difficulties."

--David Bank

Avoiding the Volunteer Trap

The Wall Street Journal's Encore section today leads with another great story by Kelly Greene on how people can find volunteer opportunities that match their talents. She features stories such as Leslie Berry, a 65-year-old retiree in suburban Atlanta, who spends two days leading 4th and 5th graders on tours of the High Museum of Art; and Rita Vance, in Ashland, Ore., who created her own position at the local library, helping select and deliver books to homebound readers.

Since helping society realize that kind of "experience dividend" is what Civic Ventures and Experience Corps are all about, it's no surprise the organizations were featured prominently in the article.

Rich Yurman, now 68, is an eight-year veteran of Experience Corps in San Francisco. "I hit age 60, and this sudden surge of wanting to be a grandparent came out of who-knew-where," he says. "I have children who are not going to have children." Mr. Yurman is working one third-grader whom he calls an "amazingly intense" poet. She jots down ideas to write about and one day a week, the young girl and Mr. Yurman get out the notebook. "She picks out a topic, and we both write about it," he says. "It's just grand."

John Gomperts, Experience Corps' chief executive, advises that it may take time to find the right opportunity. "If you want [volunteering] to be a significant part of your life, then it's likely going to take some work to figure out the right fit," he is quoted as saying. "Sometimes you take a very bumpy road to a very beautiful place. So it may be with finding just the right opportunity to engage in volunteer activities."

Marc Freedman, president of Civic Ventures, suggests that internships can be helpful in vetting opportunities -- and getting a foot in the door. "Maybe," he says, "you can develop your own internship where you rotate through two to three nonprofits that seem appealing, where you can try different roles and structures. You could even do it while you're still working by using vacation time."

Marc also notes that, ironically, it is often the parts of volunteerism that are most like work that hold the most appeal. "People tend to focus very heavily on the idealism of this phase of giving back," he says in the article. "But when you talk to people who are involved [as volunteers], they say there are more immediate aspects that appeal to them. The relationships and a sense of purpose are just as important as some of the more lofty ideals in getting a satisfying experience."

As part of the same package, Kelly interviews Marc about older adults "social entrepreneurs" creating their own opportunities, in a podcast available on the site.

--David Bank

Innovation Network

The tremendous response to the call for nominations for the Purpose Prize shows that a movement is already well underway among energized baby boomers (and others) to create a new stage of life and work, in what used to be called the retirement years, that's all about social purpose, community involvement and innovative solutions.

To build on this momentum, Civic Ventures is seeking ways to service a network of such "social innovators in the second half of life" to help people find each other, work together and, as Tom Munnecke says, find out what's working and do more of it.

I put together a very rough memo to kick off our internal planning for such an "Innovation Network." Zack Rosen of CivicSpace suggested I post it, so in the spirit of open-source networking and turning the process inside-out, here it is (now in PDF version):

Download network_development_post_version.pdf 

This will be coming together in the next few months; I'm eager to hear your thoughts.

--David Bank

2073

We just got the Social Security card for our son, Isaac Alejandro Chavez Bank, aged two weeks. Unless (until?) Congress raises the retirement age, he should be eligible for retirement benefits when he turns 67 in 2073. I'm going to let him know he should be thinking about Plan B.

--David Bank

Think Anew, Act Anew

I saw SF Mayor Gavin Newsom at a reception the other day for the upcoming SF Connect initiative, his effort to mobilize citizens around homelessness, the environment, youth and technology access (a la the recent deal with Google for free citywide wi-fi). Experience Corps is a key partner, particularly in the Youth Connect initiative.

Gavin used a quote from Lincoln that I liked, so I looked it up:

"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulties, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

The citation, for those that care about such things,  is from Lincoln's second annual message to Congress on Dec. 1, 1862.

--David Bank

Leadership Deficit -- and Surplus

Marc Freedman, president of Civic Ventures, posted this commentary on CV's e-newsletter for March:

Where will we find the human beings to do those things that only human beings can do - specifically, to lead, manage, and staff a growing nonprofit sector historically long on idealism and short on capacity?

As a new report from Thomas J. Tierney at the Bridgespan Group - "The Nonprofit Sector's Leadership Deficit" - drives home, there is nothing abstract or philosophical about this question. It is rapidly becoming an urgent plea, as the experience gap in the social sector widens into a chasm.

Bridgespan's extensive new study finds that nonprofits with revenues greater than $250,000 will need to attract and develop some 640,000 new senior managers over the next decade - the equivalent of 2.4 times the number currently employed.
Tinkering will not do. The human resource needs opening up at all levels of the nonprofit world are simply too large and too near. While the answer won't ultimately be simple or singular, there is one place we need to concentrate our quest for talent: the vast population of aging boomers now moving into their 50s and 60s.

Bringing boomers searching for meaning to nonprofits looking for leaders is logical and necessary, but it won't be easy. It will demand breathtaking innovation - not only through rewriting the career trajectory and helping experienced professionals bridge into the nonprofit sector, but also through creating the infrastructure for large numbers of nonprofit leaders to sign up for another, albeit renegotiated, tour of duty.

Will we meet this challenge? It is a tall order to be sure - but not too tall. After all, the history of aging in America is one of spectacular innovation and change. Fifty years ago we didn't even have retirement communities or senior centers. And that's not the only source of inspiration. At the middle of the last century we invented the GI Bill to help millions of Americans navigate their way back to useful roles in civilian life. We'll need to think at that scale once again.

--Marc Freedman

Network Effect

Civic Ventures’ newest senior fellow is Tom Munnecke, a veteran software designer, network agitator and creative thinker. Tom is helping us design our on- and offline “innovation network,” linking people and organizations working to realize the “experience dividend.”

Tom spent most of his 30-year software career as one of the lead architects for two large hospital information systems, the Veteran’s Administration’s VistA program and the Pentagon's CHCS. VistA was an open-source system before the term even existed, and (thanks to a creative use of the Freedom of Information Act) is evolving into widely used open-source hospital information system called World Vista. In the early 1990s, Tom had what he calls a career-limiting insight. “I suspected that the perverse incentives in many of our systems were so great, that using computers to make them more efficient would only make them get worse faster,” he says.

The technology boom of the 1990s provided financing for Tom’s “encore career” which he has spent looking for system-changing approaches. He says he organizes these efforts around the question, ”What is the simplest thing that I can do to create maximum benefit for humanity?” His ongoing set of experiments includes GivingSpace and the Uplift Academy . His blog is a running commentary on good ideas. 

Tom has already helped our thinking about how to take advantage of the “network effect” to jumpstart the movement for social innovation in the second half of life and the possibilities for a corps of "better world boomers." We look forward to linking his network and ours to spur even more creative collaboration. Welcome, Tom!

--David Bank 

Hands On

Hands On Network is an umbrella organization for volunteer centers around the country, but it’s starting to move way beyond “just volunteering.”

Robert Egger, founder of DC Central Kitchen and author of “Begging for Change,” posted an excellent report on Hands On’s annual conference in Boston earlier this month. Our colleague, John Gomperts, who is on Hands On’s board and was at the conference, agrees that the Network, headed by Michelle Nunn, is starting to push volunteering and service in exciting new directions.

“They crossed the Volunteer Rubicon by beginning to talk about ‘why,’" Egger writes. “Imagine the power if we politicized our volunteers…not to tell them who to vote for but to tell them politely that while volunteering is wicked cool, we cannot volunteer nor charity away problems like homeless, poverty, abuse and exclusion…and the folly of trying to fix big ass problems using our ‘extra, left over’ stuff like spare time, end of the year money, surplus food or used clothing.”

People both younger and older want to work for change, not just volunteer. The difference is not just that work pays and volunteering doesn’t, it’s that paid work means that the organization doing the paying has to value the work as much as the worker does. Hands On, Egger writes, “is ready to take the bull by the horns and ask nonprofit partners to step up and move beyond painting the walls (for the 100^th time), sorting cans or even chopping veggies.”

Hands On is starting to see itself as a foundation-- in the grant-giving, resource-allocating sense, even if their grants are of volunteer time and talent. Members can allocate this non-monetary asset based on the performance of organizations that need them, Egger argues, and thus start to exercise market power for more effective approaches to social challenges.

“You could make the case that this group of Hands On members holds more wealth and opportunity that the traditional foundation community ever will,” Egger says. “The way they choose to spend or allocate their resources could well be the key to the kind of sector-wide reform that could elevate the nonprofit community into the powerhouse it should have always been, locally and nationally.”

--David Bank