Encore: Work that matters in the second half of life.

Jacksonville is working to become a model city for people seeking encore careers.

With more than 1 million residents, a quarter of them over age 50, the largest city in Florida has a wealth of older residents willing to share their talent and experience.

“We know there is a large, willing group of older adults in Jacksonville who would like to work, but work differently,” said Mark LeMaire, director of Life: Act 2, a partnership established by the United Way of Northeastern Florida. “We see our role as trying to soften up some of the area businesses to create ways they could accommodate them, by making the structure more flexible and making it easier to break in.”

A decade-long community-building effort led to this month’s Civic Engagement Day, which generated a plethora of ideas about how local nonprofits and employers can engage mature adults in jobs and volunteerism. Marc Freedman and Judy Goggin of Civic Ventures helped facilitate meetings from 8 a.m. until late evening with about 200 local leaders. (Civic Ventures is the publisher of Encore.org.) A podcast is available of Freedman’s interview with the local NPR station.

“Marc and Judy stepped into a community that was already pretty fired up and helped us discover some creative ways we can stimulate businesses and nonprofits to think differently about older adults and what retirement can mean,” LaMaire said.

The United Way launched Jacksonville’s civic engagement project in 1999 with a 28-month planning process involving 78 local leaders. After many conversations, participants agreed to focus on creating a culture shift in the way people view and talk about aging.

United Way formed the Life: Act 2 Partnership Council and a Civic Engagement Visioning Task Force of 35 members charged with developing a strategic plan to channel the talents of older adults into the community. Participants come from health care providers, universities, government, nonprofits, corporations and small businesses. The Florida Department of Elder Affairs is funding the strategic planning process in hopes that the group will create a model that can be replicated in other Florida cities.

Task force members have their work cut out for them. One local workforce expert recently told them that “older workers are not on the radar screen” of most local businesses, which are trying to recruit younger people. “We didn’t want to hear that. It was a nice reality check,” LeMaire noted.

Yet some Jacksonville residents have found encore careers. One is Marc Preminger, a retired chief financial officer of an insurance company. After a year of playing golf, he began looking for ways to use his skills and discovered that many widows and widowers needed help with their finances. He is currently working with local nonprofits to create a boot camp to help older adults learn to pay bills and balance checkbooks for the first time.

Another local resident, Steve Fordham, a former human resources manager for phone companies, is creating a retraining program for older adults in his role as executive director of Florida Community College’s Institute for Staff and Organizational Development.

“You’re at that stage of life where you don’t focus on yourself anymore,” Patti Straatsma, a former animal technician who now runs the Jacksonville Heart/Lung Transplant Support Group, told The Florida Times-Union.

LeMaire realizes that changing longtime perceptions about employing older adults is not an easy task. “The good news for us,” he said, “is that many of the people we think we have to educate in the community have been a part of this process.”