Recognizing nonprofits and individuals in Maricopa County for meeting important social needs, solving problems, and improving well-being for people and communities through the encore movement.
The Encore Movement in Maricopa County
The encore concept—engaging people age 50+ in roles that combine personal meaning with social impact—is growing across the country, and particularly in Phoenix with its 1.1 million baby boomers. As such, it’s critical to understand this population’s great potential for positive impact on the region’s communities.
Later life should be a time of continued learning, challenges, opportunities, and satisfaction. More and more, as people enter their 50s and 60s, they look not primarily toward retirement, but to a new turn in their working life that brings fresh challenges and rewards. They want to contribute to their community, act on their values and convictions, and apply their years of experience and skill to something different. Many are not ready to pare down their work life significantly. Instead, they look for a whole new kind of work—a career at least as fulfilling and engrossing as their previous one, and maybe more so.
For them, the next step is their encore career – and many organizations are finding among these encore adults a rich source of professional and technical expertise, maturity, and vision.
In the best cases, innovative organizations and skilled encore workers create remarkable things together—new forms of human and community service, new avenues of leadership, new solutions to common problems. When that happens, all of us benefit.