Theodore Roszak popularized the term “counterculture” in 1969 with is book, The Making of a Counter Culture. He returns to the subject 40 years later with The Making of an Elder Culture, which examines the way the countercultureal values of an “audacious generation” is shaping an elder-dominated society.

What inspired your encore career?

For some, it’s a voice that grows louder. For others, it’s a sudden calling, a gradual shift in priorities or a life-changing event.

Share your encore moment and you could win a free trip. Ten winners of the “My Encore Moment” story contest will receive all-expenses-paid trips to the first-ever Encore Careers Summit December 6-8 at Stanford University.

Juanita Watson, 59, and her friends were laughing uncontrollably at a comedian’s jokes about hapless baby boomers when she turned to the others and said, “We have to create a game about this!”

And they did. Just launched, the Baby Boomer Retirement Game takes former flower children and yuppies on a nostalgic journey through the last five decades with the end of goal of attaining inner peace.

For Watson, who recently retired from her job as a special education administrator, promoting and selling the game has become an encore career. She makes certain that the workers who assemble the games are referred by a nonprofit agency that places highly challenged adults with special needs.

Nonprofit organizations, schools and health care providers have openings for experienced workers. Boomers want them. How do you connect the two?

Statistically, African American males drop out of high school at nearly double the rate of their white counterparts. That’s unacceptable to Marine colonel-turned-nonprofit head John Boggs of Washington, D.C.

To buck the trend, he’s helping run a program that encourages young black males to stay in school and redirect the course of their lives.

At 55, Michael Casey decided to pursue the job he had always wanted — high school math teacher.

An engineer and small-business owner, Casey returned to school to get his teaching certificate. He took a 50% pay cut to teach algebra and calculus in inner-city Dallas for five years, before moving to a suburban school in Carrolton, Texas.

“Right after 9/11, I decided I wanted to do something that would give something back,” Casey told Emily Brandon of USNews and World Report.

Encore.org member Joel Levinson writes:

I have always felt there should be certain compensation for volunteers at the city and state levels. Parking passes, tuition credits, food script, entertainment passes, etc. These can be tied into corporate sponsors with little out of pocket expenses for the city.

A lot of city jobs are done by citizen volunteers, and cities would have a difficult time with their budget if not for them. How about rewarding volunteers and organizing a union of sorts. It may also encourage more people to participate if there were a little incentive for their efforts.

Encore.org member David Cohen, a senior fellow at Experience Corps, contributed this comment:

Choosing Will Allen, the Milwaukee urban farmer, for a MacArthur genius award gave me great pleasure.

I was part of a team at the Advocacy Institute--with key colleagues Sharvell Becton, Laura Chambers, Keiko Koizumi and Kathleen Sheekey-- that worked on the Leadership for a Changing World Program (LCW) in partnership with the Ford Foundation and the Robert Wagner School of Public Service at New York University (NYU).

Our purpose was to award through varieties of recognition, including money, social change leadership that tackled intractable social problems systemically and systematically. Our focus was to find those leaders whose leadership made a difference in people's lives but who were largely unrecognized.

Former Secretary of Education Richard Riley is calling for a $10 billion investment in a major national mobilization to reverse the dropout epidemic in America’s high schools.

Riley’s call echoes the recent “More to Give” report to the AARP, which called for a national initiative to put 100,000 adult mentors and advocates to work at the nation’s 2,000 “dropout factories.”

Such a national mobilization represents an opportunity for tens of thousands of experienced Americans to put their time and talents to work to ensure success for the next generation. Riley and his co-author Terry K. Peterson say boomers who want to give back are one of the best untapped resources for filling the chronic shortage of teachers.

The year 1968 is often cited as the beginning of a long period of division among baby boomers. But 40 years later, many members of that generation are finding common cause in giving back through encore careers, national service or volunteering.