About the Author
Marc Freedman is the founder and CEO of Civic Ventures, a think tank and incubator working to help society achieve the greatest return on experience. He's also co-founder of Experience Corps, the nation's largest nonprofit national service program engaging Americans over 55, and The Purpose Prize, the nation's first prize for, and biggest investment in, social innovators over 60.
Freedman is one of the nation's leading thinkers and writers on the opportunities presented by the aging of America. He is author of Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life (PublicAffairs Books, June 2007), which author Daniel Pink calls “the rare book that can change the national conversation." Freedman's earlier books include Prime Time: How Baby Boomers Will Revolutionize Retirement and Transform America and The Kindness of Strangers: Adult Mentors, Urban Youth, and the New Volunteerism. Freedman is frequently published and often quoted in a wide range of media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, Money magazine, NBC News, the Chronicle of Philanthropy, and more.
Recognized by Fast Company magazine as one of the nation's leading social entrepreneurs, Freedman has been honored with an Ashoka Senior Fellowship, the Prime Mover award of the Hunt Alternatives Fund, the Maxwell A. Pollack Award of the Gerontological Society of America, the Atlantic Fellowship in Public Policy, and the Jack Ossofsky Award from the National Council on Aging. He is a graduate of Swarthmore College with an MBA from Yale University and was a Visiting Fellow of Kings College, University of London. He lives with his wife and children in San Francisco.
A note from Marc Freedman:
Tens of millions of baby boomers are entering a period of their lives between midlife and the onset of true old age. For most, this period will not only be a new stage of life, but also of work.
I wrote this book to provide a vision of hope—not only for their own fulfillment, but for a nation where a full quarter of the population will soon be over sixty. It is a vision drawn from interviews with hundreds of people in their fifties and sixties in search of a calling in the second half of life.
These conversations left me with the sense that I was glimpsing something of historic proportions — that this is what it must have been like to travel the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s interviewing women breaking through to new roles at work, in the process changing the nature of work for everyone.
