Ruth Wooden, chairman of the board of Civic Ventures, which publishes Encore.org, was surprised at the reactions she received when she recently told friends she was planning to retire from her position as president of a nonprofit. Some people asked, “Are you sick?” But the most frequent response was, “What are you going to do next?”

Marci Alboher appeared recently on JobTalkAmerica, a new Internet radio show hosted by Ted Canova and Sam Zeff, two veteran journalists who are helping people reinvigorate their job search and find balance in their lives.

Click here to listen to the interview, in which Alboher talks about her own encore career search and provides tips to others.

Dr. Robert Butler, a Pulitzer Prize winning expert on aging who coined the word “ageism,” died on Sunday at age 83. He was the founding director of the National Institute on Aging, one of the National Institutes of Health, and wrote several books on aging, including the one for which he won the Pulitzer Prize: Why Survive: Being Old in America.

He delved into the implications of aging in our society in another book, The Longevity Revolution. You can read excerpts here.

President Obama announced today his intent to nominate seven individuals to the board of directors of the Corporation for National and Community Service, including Phyllis Segal, a vice president of Civic Ventures. Encore.org is an initiative of Civic Ventures, a nonprofit think tank that is leading the call to engage millions of experienced individuals in becoming a force for social change.

Gary Maxworthy, who was awarded The Purpose Prize in 2007, has been honored with a Jefferson Award, the “Nobel Prize of Public Service,” for creating a San Francisco Food Bank initiative that distributes 80 million pounds of produce to California’s 3 million residents at risk of hunger.

How do you reinvent yourself in retirement? How do you handle the finances? What extra obstacles do women face? Are younger workers in competition with older workers? Those are some of the topics that three best-selling authors discuss during a June 17 webcast sponsored by Merrill Lynch called “Reinventing Retirement: Second Acts.”

Sonoma State University in Northern California is introducing a one-year certification program to prepare graduates to become “patient navigators,” a growing profession that ranked high in a recent study of emerging encore careers.

Offered in partnership with Sonoma County’s Integrative Medical Clinic Foundation, the one-year program will debut in the fall of 2010. It is open to participants nationwide. Courses will be mostly online, with live meetings one weekend per month at Sonoma State University, which is located in Rohnert Park, Calif., just north of San Francisco.

Hundreds of thousands of boomers and others are poised to work on proven innovations and cost-effective interventions to help kids succeed, improve people’s health and protect the environment.

That’s why is makes sense to make modest investments in advancing encore careers – investments that will be recouped in the added success of targeted, high-priority initiatives that deploy this windfall of experienced, talented people. Encore talent is early talent, “venture human capital” that can help take promising models to full-scale solutions.

For those of us trying to plan financially for the life stage formerly known as retirement, Mark Miller’s new book, The Hard Times Guide to Retirement Security, is required reading. My eyes tend to glaze over when I read about concepts like 401(k)s or annuities, but Miller has a gift for sifting through the available information and distilling it into clear, easy-to-understand advice. Here are some of his insights during a recent conversation.

The Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, signed by President Obama in April 2009, establishes federal encore fellowships for Americans age 55 and older. The new law marks the first time federal legislation has recognized encore careers and the need for pathways that get people from one stage to the next.