Maricopa County, Arizona
For nearly a decade, Maricopa County has been developing new programs that tap encore talent in the community to fill high-demand needs like, teaching, elder care and nursing.
Ten years ago, several factors converged to set the stage for making experience matter in the second half of life in Maricopa. Faced with a rapidly growing and aging population, community leaders realized they must capture encore talent to solve growing social needs – needs for more teachers, early childhood educators, after-school specialists, college faculty, nurses, health care aides, caregivers, government employees, social workers and leaders for its growing nonprofit and public sectors. At the same time, a new foundation, The Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust, started with a broad vision for productive aging for the county.
With no existing models for tapping encore talent to solve social problems, the Piper Trust took steps to encourage innovative thinking, build community awareness and invent new approaches. In 2002 the Maricopa Commission on Productive Aging was convened to determine a county-wide agenda. Next, working with national partners Civic Ventures and Libraries for the Future, the Trust helped establish four The Next Chapter® projects to give people over 50 new ways to connect to meaningful opportunities. Experience Corps was established in two school districts, showing how older adults can improve student success; GateWay Community College put new encore career on-ramps in place; and 10 local nonprofits created new meaningful paid and unpaid roles for boomers.
In late 2008 the Piper Trust launched a county-wide initiative, Experience Matters, to align and expand these various efforts that had emerged to capture engage boomers’ time, talent and experience to help meet the county’s growing needs in education, health care and social services.
After a year of planning and engaging a wide range of players, the Experience Matters Consortium was started in late 2009. It is an innovative new network which fosters paid and unpaid service opportunities for experienced people who wish to find meaningful work with social purpose. It is operating as a consortium that works strategically with allies and partners throughout Maricopa County to enhance the capacity of the public and nonprofit sectors to tap into the talent of committed adults in our community. It is guided by an advisory board of encore leaders from the private, public and nonprofit sectors, community college, the statewide nonprofit alliance, county human services department, Arizona Community Foundation, United Way and HandsOn.
More information:
- Login or register to post comments
- Email this page