Online Vol. 09.2007 

WHEN ONE CAREER IS NOT ENOUGH

Purpose Prize Winners Redefine Retirement

By Frank Brown

Sharon Rohrbach has a proven formula for saving the lives of at-risk infants, but she doesn't have the resources to expand the program nationally, despite encouragement from the federal government. That puts Rohrbach, the head of a local non-profit with a stellar record of improving newborn babies' health, in a frustrating position.

Enter the Purpose Prize, a program that gives $100,000 to each of five pioneers over 60 years old who are attacking social problems with innovation and creativity. Rohrbach won that prize on September 4th. It is money that will enable Rohrbach, founder of the St. Louis-based Nurses for Newborns Foundation, to reproduce her model in other states.

"I can't do that while I am doing the everyday raising of $1,000 a day to keep the organization going. I'm hoping to find someone else so I can work on national expansion," says Rohrbach, who was chosen from over 1,000 social service entrepreneurs nominated for the prize. "The Purpose Prize will allow me to do that, to focus on replication nationwide."

The Purpose Prize, launched two years ago by Civic Ventures of San Francisco, is funded by grants from the John Templeton Foundation and the Atlantic Philanthropies. The Purpose Prize's aim, according to Civic Ventures president and founder Marc Freedman, is to highlight examples of people who have found success in purposeful work at a time in life when many are entering retirement. The Prize's first year, 2006, marked the point at which the initial wave of America's 77 million baby boomers reached the age of 60, says Freedman, author of Prime Time: How Baby Boomers Revolutionize Retirement and Transform America.

As the Purpose Prize's 21 judges found, Rohrbach fits these criteria to a T. During a 16-year career as a neonatal nurse in St. Louis, Rohrbach was struck by the sometime fatal lack of follow-up nursing care available to newborns and their mothers. And, she was appalled by the United States' perennial abysmal ranking in worldwide infant mortality rates. In 1992, Rohrbach started Nurses for Newborns, which has grown to have 70 employees and 1,200 volunteers working in nearly 60 counties in Missouri and Tennessee.

As she gets older, Rohrbach says she senses no sign of her commitment flagging: "I have an unusual interest in making the world a better place. That's where my passion lies... The U.S. ranks 43rd in infant mortality. I have a burning desire to change that."

Like the other five winners of this year's Purpose Prize, Rohrbach is little known outside of the region where she works. According to prize director Jim Emerman, though this year's 15 finalists may not be nationally known yet, "Their stories are really emblematic of what we are trying to say with the Purpose Prize."

One characteristic that judges are looking for is, in the words of the Purpose Prize's description, people who "are living proof that aging does not mean stagnation and decline." Wilma Melville is just such a person.

In the spring of 1995, Melville, a former physical education teacher in the Torrance, California school system, was several years into a comfortable but active retirement at her Southern California home where she trained animals as a hobby. Then, in April of that year, a massive truck bomb destroyed a swath of Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and wounding over 800. Melville and her black Labrador retriever, Murphy, a search dog, were quickly on a plane to the scene to help find victims trapped in the Oklahoma City wreckage.

"I had chosen this as a hobby and I was catapulted into this," says Melville, 74, who was shocked at the dearth of canine search teams available to help. "My age was never a factor. I never said, 'I'm 63 and I can't do this.' It was 'Holy mackerel! Look at this lack.'"

At the time of the Oklahoma City bombing, there were only about 15 advanced dog search teams in the United States that were certified by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Today, there are 150 such teams, 55 of them from the Search Dog Foundation that Melville was inspired to found after her Oklahoma City experience.

The Search Dog Foundation, based in Ojai, California with 10 employees, is, like Rohrbach's Nurses for Newborns Foundation, poised to go national. "I would like to set up a national training center, a place where teams can come from all over," says Melville, who recently secured a large donation to help the Search Dog Foundation move toward purchasing a 125-acre ranch to house the planned training center. "That's what's next on my list."

This year's three other winners of the Purpose Prize are a varied group. After a career in medicine and academia, Donald Berwick, 60, president of the Massachusetts-based Institute for Healthcare Improvement, is using tactics borrowed from political campaigns to reduce unnecessary deaths in the nation's hospitals. The oldest winner, 91-year-old H. Gene Jones, founded the Opening Minds Through Arts program to demonstrate how the re-introduction of arts into Tucson's public schools can boost test scores.

Gordon Johnson founded the non-profit Neighbor to Family Inc. foster care agency in 1998, after an intense, varied career in top positions helping the impoverished and defenseless from Illinois to Florida. Johnson, now 74, ran a $10 million federal Model City program in Miami's Liberty City during the volatile aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. He also headed Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, responsible for some 600,000 children entrusted to the state over his seven-year tenure. It was out of this experience that Johnson eventually developed Neighbor to Family, which, among other strategies, aims to keep siblings together in community-based foster homes.

"No social programs were dealing with this," remembers Johnson. "It started as a small little program but it has blossomed. Five states and a $36 million budget."

"I still have not come to grips with the fact that I'm 74," says Johnson, who is laying the groundwork for expanding Neighbor to Family to Texas and Ohio in the coming months. "Mentally, I don't feel like 74. Physically - sometimes. But I'm just not cut out to sit at home and watch TV."

Frank Brown is a writer living in New Haven, Connecticut

For more information about the Purpose Prize, visit: www.purposeprize.org.

Marby Sparkman, Editor
milestoneseditor@templeton.org

Pamela Thompson, Vice President of Communications
pthompson@templeton.org

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