The Maine Community Foundation is looking for a new generation of leaders: the boomer generation.

The community foundation, which is recruiting older adults for a leadership training initiative next year, is one of 10 around the country to receive funding from The Atlantic Philanthropies’ Community Experience Partnership program, which supports programs aimed at increasing the civic engagement levels of baby boomers.

“We’re used to seeing the aging work force described as a looming threat, a demographic drag with crippling repercussions for our economy,” begins an editorial in The Oregonian, Oregon’s largest newspaper.

But a groundbreaking report, “Everyone Matters,” from the Multnomah County Task Force on Vital Aging, helped the newspaper see the issue in a new way.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” the editorial continues, highlighting the report’s suggestion that businesses, governments and nonprofits “do a kind of mind-flip: Take this looming liability and convert it into a tremendous asset for our region.”

Q. You’ve spent your career in a profit-making business but want your work to be more in line with your personal values… Is this the right reason to make a switch?

Eilene Zimmerman tackles this and other questions about encore transitions to the nonprofit sector in her “Career Couch” column in the New York Times.

In her answer, she quotes Steven Pascal-Joiner, midcareer transitions coordinator for Idealist.org. “It’s not enough to say, ‘I want to work for a nonprofit,’” he said. “You need to know what kind of organization you want to work for, the role you want to play and why.”

Linda Stewart heard from many of her fellow baby boomers that they didn’t want traditional employment but they didn’t want traditional retirement, either.

So, after 25 years in the financial industry, she launched Epoch last year to match experienced workers with specific tasks beyond an employer’s capacities. Stewart asks CEOs to name three or four initiatives that aren’t moving ahead fast enough. Then she matches them with specialists who can fill those needs.

Serving on the board of a nonprofit organization is a good way to demonstrate leadership skills.

The first wave of “next generation” of nonprofit leaders may be nonprofit executives and others now in their 40s and 50s, according to a new report on the nonprofit leadership gap.

The study, “Ready to Lead? Next Generation Leaders Speak Out,”
focuses on the need to nurture young leaders in their 20s and 30s. But it has important ramifications for experienced workers, too.

J.B. Schramm, founder of College Summit, which partners with school districts to help low-income students through the college application process.

Social entrepreneurship has arrived as a significant public policy tool, according to New York Times columnist David Brooks in today’s piece, “Thoroughly Modern Do-Gooders.

Brooks queues up the next big challenge for social entrepreneurs: “Their problem now is scalability. How do the social entrepreneurs replicate successful programs so that they can be big enough to make a national difference?”

Dale Olen is the winner of the first Fred Lindner Prize for Social Innovation in Wisconsin, modeled on the Purpose Prize.

It was, as they say, a watershed moment.

At a recent statewide environmental lobbying day, Dale Olen looked on with pride as half a dozen older adults whom he had trained as water advocates lobbied their legislators for the first time.

Olen has taken skills he honed helping people foster healthy relationships with one another and applied them to helping people foster healthy relationships with the earth.

Kathleen Davies’ path to her encore career was bumpy, twisted and rural.

In 2001, the sinking economy dealt her 23-year-old public relations firm a lethal blow. “At age 53, I hoped to reinvent myself by helping preserve wildlife and nature — though I wasn’t quite sure how,” Davies writes in “Pursuing a Passion for Nature After a Life in Business” in the March 20 issue of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

The “What’s Your Workforce Crisis?” conference tackled the challenges of finding skilled workers in Silicon Valley. Alison Webber of SEIU Local 1877 chats with Fred Slone, workforce development manager for San Mateo County. Photo by Terry Nagel/Civic Ventures.

Most participants arrived at a conference aimed at addressing California’s workforce needs assuming that the impending retirement of members of the baby boom generation represented a looming crisis.

Many left the “What’s Your Workforce Crisis?” conference thinking that boomers’ time and talent just might represent a new opportunity to meet critical workforce gaps.

Lawmakers in Iowa are seeking to create a “Baby Boomer Generation Commission” to find ways to attract mature workers to fill a shortage of experienced workers that is expected to crimp the state’s economy.

More than two dozen members of Iowa’s House of Representatives are cosponsoring a bill to create a commission to attract baby boomers to the state.