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

Encore Fellowships are a central feature of both the Serve America Act of 2008, introduced by Senators Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch, and the Encore Service Act of 2008, proposed by Senators Chris Dodd and Thad Cochran, along with Kennedy.

Other innovative features in the bills would also help catalyze new solutions to major social challenges by calling Americans of all ages to serve their country and their communities. The two bills have some minor differences in approach, which will be worked out in the inevitably lengthy legislative process.

Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain are both co-sponsors of the Serve America Act, and both have pledged to sign it into law if elected.

Baltimore’s intergenerational alliance of young people and older adults won a long-awaited victory this week when Mayor Sheila Dixon added $250,000 for the successful reading program to next year’s city budget.

Last month, 85 members of Experience Corps went to the Baltimore City Council to ask for funds to expand the successful program in which 373 senior volunteers help students in 20 Baltimore area schools learn to read. More than a dozen people described Experience Corps’ positive impacts on children, as well as the satisfaction it affords the adults who mentor them.

Gavin Newsom. Photo by Paul Sakuma/Associated Press.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom became the latest political leader to call for the expansion of Experience Corps, the successful tutoring and mentoring program engaging adults over 55, as a way to improve public schools.

Leigh Hoes, 51, trained to become a pharmacy technician in a one-year program at Richland College. She plans to work into her 60s or 70s. Photo by Randy Eli Grothe/Dallas Morning News.

Boomers are “rebooting” at Richland College in Dallas, one of the new wave of community colleges that are reshaping their programs to meet the new needs of career-switching baby boomers.

For the second year in a row, Fast Company magazine recognized Civic Ventures for its innovative approach to promoting encore careers for baby boomers looking for meaningful work.

The awards were given to the “most influential and effective social entrepreneurs who are solving the world’s problems” and the organizations they have helped to create. The winners, Fast Company writes, “use the tools of business to solve the world’s most pressing problems” and “demonstrate a consistent and unusually large impact on society.”

Robert Chambers. Photo by Steve Tripoli/Marketplace.

Robert Chambers has raised approximately $2 million to expand Bonnie CLAC, which finances new car purchases for low-income families, since he was named a Purpose Prize winner in 2006.

Chambers was profiled on Marketplace, the NPR business program, which captured well the “encore moment” when Chambers knew he had to do something different.

Older social innovators working overseas will be eligible for Civic Ventures’ Purpose Prize in 2008. The change will open the two-year-old prize program to a new group of people over 60 who are tackling some of the world’s most pressing problems.

In the last two years, the Purpose Prize has highlighted and invested in social innovators whose work addresses a wide range of issues in the U.S., including education, health care and poverty. The prize program is still seeking such domestic entrepreneurs, of course, and is also eager to identify U.S. residents with innovative projects around the world.

“We know that there are many social innovators in this stage of life who are passionate about issues such as global health, economic development and climate change,” said Jim Emerman, director of the prize program.

Nominations for the prizes of up to $100,000 are open until March 1, 2008.

Barbara Thomas

“When third-grader Destiny comes running up to Barbara Thomas in the playground at Malcolm X Academy, there is no doubt that something special is going on,” begins a profile of the longtime Experience Corps member in the San Francisco BayView newspaper. “Thomas gets a big hug from the sweet-faced student and when Destiny is asked about the hug, she says simply, ‘Mrs. Thomas is my friend.’”

Gary Maxworthy, founder of Farm to Family. Photo by S. Smith Patrick/Civic Ventures.

Time magazine profiles Gary Maxworthy, a 2007 Purpose Prize winner, who gave up a six-figure salary in the food-distribution business to start Farm to Family, which this year will deliver 34 million pounds of free produce to low-income families in California.

“Maxworthy is part of a small movement of folks leaving a solid career at mid-life to rediscover a sense of purpose,” writes Dan Kadlec. “Rather than leave a legacy at life’s end, they choose to live their legacy now.”