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.

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.

More people are working longer as retirement savings take a hit from falling stock prices and home values.

That is making the need for appealing encore careers even more urgent for those who need to work but who can’t or don’t want to keep doing what they’ve been doing.

How is the financial crisis affecting your encore career plans?

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.

When USA Today asked readers to tell how they have changed course at midlife and found new careers, dozens responded with tales of fulfillment.

Among those described in “Midlifers Live Their Dreams by Changing Careers” is 47-year-old Frank Miele, who says it took him “2-1/2 seconds” to decide to leave his partnership in a law firm to start his own art gallery in New York City, a decision he’s never regretted. After quitting his job selling medical products and becoming a physical education teacher and coach at age 46, Joe Sabia of Boca Raton, Fla., said he has “the best job in the world.”

Will Allen, who took a buyout from Procter & Gamble to become an urban farmer, is a winner of one of the MacArthur Foundation's 2008 "genius" awards for his work "transforming the cultivation, production, and delivery of healthy foods to underserved, urban populations."

Allen, 59 years old, is one of the seven MacArthur winners this year (out of 25) who are more than 50 years old. The increasing number of older winners bears out economist David Galenson's findings that genius comes in two forms: younger innovators who are distinguished by conceptual breakthroughs (the proverbial light bulb going on overhead), and older innovators who have an experimental bent, an approach to problem-solving that relies on years of experience and improvement.

Courtland Milloy has a terrific column in The Washington Post about the encore career of Harold “Hal” J. Gordon, the founder of the Holy Comforter St. Cyprian Community Action Group, who died last month at 74. The organization helped hundreds of poor, homeless and unemployed city residents and operates the largest residential substance abuse facility in the nation’s capital.

As Milloy tells the story:

Gordon had retired from the federal government at 54 thinking that he was going to fish and play poker to his heart’s content. But his soul remained restless, so he began a quest for a new purpose in life.

When Mary Bub and her husband closed their bookstore/art gallery and moved to a small farm in Elkhorn, Wisc., she planned to ease into retirement. That didn’t happen.

Instead, a few personal development workshops quickly grew into the Wisconsin Rural Women’s Initiative, a nonprofit that brings together rural farm women in “Gathering Circles” to talk about problems such as isolation and physical abuse. For some, it is the first time they’ve left their farms in 20 years.

Bub founded the organization a decade ago, when she was 54. “The women are phenomenal and needy and isolated and I love them,” she says. “It’s been 11 years now and I’m not burned out yet.”