Yes, Americans are getting older. But that creates opportunities for baby boomers looking for an encore career. “As tens of millions of people live into their 80s and 90s, we’ll need millions of others in their 50s and 60s and 70s to help care for them – not just within families, but through second careers,” says Marc Freedman, founder and CEO of Civic Ventures.

Every day, 8,000 Americans turn 60 and many can expect 100-year life spans. The length of retirement for centenarians could be more than 30 years. Not everyone finds the prospect of three decades of leisure time enviable, much less sensible. For Marc Freedman, author of The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife, it is also an egregious waste of the talent and experience accumulated by nearly 80 million boomers.

Millions of Americans are looking for work, and some 400,000 apply for unemployment benefits each week. Thousands more have exhausted all their jobless benefits. So when some companies posted open jobs, and stated the unemployed need not apply, a firestorm erupted. Now Congress is getting involved. Marci Alboher, vice president at Civic Ventures, weighs in on the issues.

We celebrate individuals from time to time for breaking new ground or delivering creative, efficient solutions to public problems. But rarely do we pay attention to where tomorrow's innovators will come from. At City Year and Civic Ventures, this "new pipeline" approach is built into the mission of our organizations. We share an expectation that we should be engaging people in solving, or building capacity to solve, their communities' problems.

Older workers, the argument goes, are “sucking the oxygen out of the atmosphere.” Any job found is one that a younger person will be denied; any social support received for this stage of life is one they won’t get for theirs – and will have to pay for later." Suzanne Braun Levine, author of Father Courage: What Happens When Men Put Family First and Civic Ventures board member, discusses work-family conflict.