Doing Good Work and Getting Paid to Do It

Between working at a for-profit business for a salary and working at a non-profit organization as a volunteer, there’s another path for rebooters: Doing “good work” and getting paid for it.

That is, starting a new career by taking on a salaried position in an organization devoted to some higher social good, such as health care, education and social services.

Marc Freedman, co-founder of Civic Ventures, author and one of the nation's leading thinkers and writers on the opportunities presented by the aging of America, documents this growing trend in Encore: Finding Work that Matters in the Second Half of Life. He calls it one of the most significant developments of the new century, and the biggest change in the American workforce since the women’s movement.

“Millions of boomers are headed not for an endless vacation but for a new stage of work, driven both by the desire to remain productive and the need to make ends meet over longer life spans,” he says.

"Boomers can capitalize on longer working lives to go beyond their own narrow needs, get down to some of their most significant work and leave the world a better place than they found it.”

Civic Ventures (www.civicventures.org) and its affiliate Encore.org (www.encore.org) are dedicated to helping people make such transitions to “encore careers,” working both online and offline. On the Web, Encore.org members share their stories, their ideas and their challenges. On the ground, the Encore.org community includes nonprofits, companies, colleges and other organizations that help people explore, prepare and launch their encore careers.

While RebootYou.com has no official affiliation with Civic Ventures and Encore.org, we are proud to share objectives with them and help further this valuable, vital and much needed trend.