We’ve changed our name from Encore.org to CoGenerate! Join us at cogenerate.org to bridge generational divides and co-create the future.

We’ve changed our name from Encore.org to CoGenerate! Join us at cogenerate.org to bridge generational divides and co-create the future.

W. Frederick Shaw, sees no reason to stop after working nearly 40 years in international development, primarily in South Asia.

At age 79, the 2009 Purpose Prize Fellow is living in Chandigarh, the capital of the Indian state of Punjab, and is providing services to more than 14,000 residents of two slums, Janta Colony and Adarsh Nagar. Nearly all of these residents have incomes below the official national poverty level. But he’s perfectly content and encourages other experienced workers to pursue encore careers in international development.

While younger people may be more suited to dealing with the uncertainties and vicissitudes of international work, Shaw believes older people in his age group could take jobs in home offices of development organizations or volunteer abroad during seasons with moderate weather. He sees no reason why individuals a bit younger, in their 60s or so, couldn’t take a permanent post in the developing world.

Yet few organizations are actively recruiting encore talent, Shaw says. “The need is there, but these people and their skills are not being sought,” he explains.

In contrast, Shaw welcomes older workers in his organization, Developing Indigenous Resources (DIR), the second development nonprofit he has started in South Asia. His first, Apna Sehat, was based in Pakistan and assisted 300,000 people before the Pakistani government took it over.

Shaw’s highest priority is preventing deaths. Born in Northern Ireland, he worked for years as an educator in the San Francisco Bay Area and as a professor in Vermont before going to work for CARE, a leading humanitarian organization, in West Bengal, India. His experience at CARE prompted him to go back to school at the University of California at Berkeley to obtain a doctorate in public health.

That training helped him learn to measure progress with quantitative results. For example, to demonstrate the effectiveness of DIR, he commissioned the Government Home Science College and the School of Public Health of Panjab University to carry out an independent evaluation of the organization’s progress in meeting eight public health objectives. During the past two years, DIR has reduced the number of babies who die before their first birthday from 10 percent to less than two percent. Evaluations of all of DIR’s projects can be found on the organization’s Web site.

“You don’t just look to make a nice improvement,” he says. “One should set goals and objectives in such a way that you can quantify the results.” Shaw carefully screens his projects for their sustainability, for he isn’t interested in “filling a bucket that has no bottom.” He explains, “You have to have an input and then that input has to become self-generating and produce its own resources after a while.”

He is living proof that older adults can continue to be active and innovative propagators of social change, even when the work involves living in challenging environments.

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