Longtime mechanic David Heim, 47, turned a traumatic event into a transformative encore career. Three years after a car accident that left him in a wheelchair and initially robbed him of his speech, he started a new business refurbishing donated wheelchairs in Marlborough, Mass., called Wheelchair Recycler.

Now, reports Jillian Berman in USA Today, Heim repairs and customizes the wheelchairs and then sells them to people around the world for a fraction of their usual cost. He recognized that people often struggle to find properly fitted chairs, and that Medicaid can refuse coverage for a new, better-fitting one. The Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation provides grants that help make the wheelchairs affordable.

A report has found that boomers plan to work past the traditional retirement years of 62 to 65, but they would prefer not to work on a full-time or year-round basis. Those findings echo feedback from many Encore.org members who say that flexibility is an important consideration in their encore careers.

Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes and Michael A. Smyer, co-directors of the Center on Aging and Work/Workplace Flexibility at Boston College, and Chantel Sheaks, legislative counsel for Tax and Benefits for the Workplace Flexibility 2010 campaign at Georgetown University dive headlong into the issue, examining in detail the actual experiences of older workers and employers as well as the legal ramifications of phased retirement in their Legal and Research Summary Sheet: Phased Retirement.

“How am I ever going to learn a language at 59, live through winters with no heat and no water?” Eileen Marin (left) thought before she joined the Peace Corps and moved to Armenia two years ago. “Well,” says the former market research consultant and three-time cancer survivor, “it became my life very quickly.”

Baby boomers are fueling an increase in Peace Corps applications as economic uncertainty looms, President-elect Obama’s administration takes shape and a generation of retirees turns to overseas service in their encore careers, The Dallas Morning News reports.

As a Virginia state senator and attorney general, Mark Earley spent much of the 1980s and ’90s trying to put more criminals in jail.

Now, he helps prisoners get the support and guidance they need to become leaders both inside prison and on the outside.

When Mary Bub and her husband closed their bookstore/art gallery and moved to a small farm in Elkhorn, Wisc., she planned to ease into retirement. That didn’t happen.

Instead, a few personal development workshops quickly grew into the Wisconsin Rural Women’s Initiative, a nonprofit that brings together rural farm women in “Gathering Circles” to talk about problems such as isolation and physical abuse. For some, it is the first time they’ve left their farms in 20 years.

Bub founded the organization a decade ago, when she was 54. “The women are phenomenal and needy and isolated and I love them,” she says. “It’s been 11 years now and I’m not burned out yet.”

John Keyon is a Change Agent.

On September 27 he will be helping to interview volunteers, videotaping their responses and posting podcasts on Volunteer San Diego’s Web site to demonstrate the power of volunteers. He learned how to mobilize communities to press for a vast expansion of national service opportunities at a training for ServiceNation organizers in Atlanta this summer.

The effort is aimed at the National Day of Service on September 27, when organizations around the country will stage events to demonstrate the potential of national service.

The same training also helped Keyon mobilize for his own encore career. After a long career as an environmental planner, a career-training administrator and an entrepreneur, he is now using his gerontology degree to advocate for rights and opportunities for older workers.

To mark the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the nonprofit Global Kids, has launched Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City to showcase the disaster’s heroes and reinforce emergency preparedness.

Just a few years ago, the virtual reality technology used in the game and Web site would have been alien to Carole Artigiani, 67, executive director of Global Kids and a Purpose Prize fellow.

Austin Polytechnical Academy in Chicago will welcome 258 students this fall in its high-tech manufacturing training program — a triumph at what was one of the city’s most violence-scarred schools.

The academy is also a triumph for Dan Swinney, a former machinist who helped create the new school within the public school system in 2007. The academy is intended to deliver a “two-fer”: help for beleaguered manufacturing firms and an economic jolt to struggling communities.

After a career in private practice and public health, raising children and the collapse of her marriage, Dr. Jennifer Christian said, “I pushed the reset button on my life and started experimenting to figure out what kind of bird I actually was – what kind of wings I had and how far I could go.”

She knew she wanted to be a CEO when she was 50, but getting hired as one was a problem because she’d never been one before. So she started a business devoted to reducing unnecessary medical disability costs.

Life dealt Barbara Parks a triple whammy in 2002. Her marriage fell apart, her mother was dying of cancer, and she was fired from her job at a career counseling agency.

She talked to Encore.org about how she turned her life around.