If you thought Teach for America (TFA) was just for high achieving twenty-somethings, think again.

In case you’ve never heard of TFA, it’s an organization that trains teachers for a two-year commitment in the country’s most underserved schools. The philosophy is that bringing more people into low-income classrooms will result in leaders at every level of education and profession with a lifelong commitment to improving educational equity for all children.

While TFA has historically done its recruiting on college campuses, the organization has recently been making efforts to recruit people at the other end of the career spectrum. Which is why Encore.org, where I work, teamed up with TFA last week, for a webinar explaining the TFA program and sharing the perspectives a few teachers (referred to as “corps members”) who did the program later in life.

As I travel the country talking about encore careers, I am repeatedly struck by how often teaching comes up in conversations. Veteran teachers routinely tell me that they are tired after working on their feet for twenty-five or thirty years; those teachers are ideally poised to mentor new teachers or use their skills in new ways, often in education reform or other leadership roles.Yet for every teacher getting ready to move on, there seems to be someone at the conclusion of some other kind of work eager to get into a classroom and mentor the next generation of students.

Research backs this up.

Surveys conducted by Encore.org confirm that more than six million people in the U.S. want to work in education or some other youth-focused role in their encores. That’s no surprise. Midlife is when that generative spirit kicks in, when we get consumed with thinking about what the world will be like for future generations.

Teaching isn’t easy. And teaching at the kind of resource-starved schools where TFA places its teachers is harder still.

The speakers on our webinar made that very clear. When asked about her best and worst day, Patricia Rivera, a retired VP at JP Morgan Chase who now teaches elementary school in New York, paused and relayed two stories. Her best day was easy to recall. It was the moment when a fifth grader who she’d worked with for months to improve his reading showed her his motivation and commitment by asking her how he was doing. All it took was someone encouraging him.

She also had no trouble recalling her hardest day. It involved a student who had been bounced around in various foster homes and ultimately had to be transferred to another school. “Sometimes it’s magic; and sometimes it’s tears,” she said.

The more I learn about TFA, the more I realize what a great fit the program is for an encore career. The qualities TFA looks for in candidates — leadership, perseverance, a history of achievement are obviously in strong supply in the 50+ population. What’s more, TFA realizes that good potential teachers come through many doors they have recruited veterans, seasoned professionals, even homemakers.

Still, the TFA application process is not easy.

John Purvis, a former SVP at Oracle and technology entrepreneur, who participated in our webinar, said he thought he’d experienced the “most rigorous recruiting processes known to man or woman” until he’d applied for TFA.

As we closed the webinar, I asked Tom Dunn, a retired capital punishment attorney who now teaches middle school, why he decided to move into education after working to save the lives of people on death row. He answered with this quote from Frederick Douglass which ties together his earlier career and his encore: “It’s easier to build strong children than to fix broken men.” It’s kind of hard to think of any better reason to think about teaching as a second or third act.

You can follow the video link below (WebEx) to watch a replay of our webinar, as well as TFA’s web site, which should answer a lot of your questions like how tough the application process really is, what it’s like to train and work alongside twenty-somethings, how it feels to move from the corporate world to a bureaucracy where there are no two hour lunches and your IT support may come from a bunch of high school kids.

And if you’re going to apply, the next deadline for TFA application is October 25. You can apply at this link.

Note: Of course, there are other pathways into teaching. But our webinar focused exclusively on TFA. For more information about different ways to get certified as a teacher, look at TNTP and the National Center for Education Information.