A Purpose-driven Life After 60

By Rod Dreher – Director of Publications, John Templeton Foundation

A decade ago, building contractor Allan Barsema looked at the homeless people on the street outside his Rockford, Illinois, business, and saw the man he used to be.

“I was really depressed, and had some serious alcohol addiction issues,” he recalls. “I went up to a mountaintop, where I used to do my drinking. I was going to commit suicide. But I had a spiritual awakening, came down, and detoxed myself.”

Barsema, then in early middle age, moved to Rockford to live with his parents. They helped him to recover and to rebuild a life shattered by alcohol abuse. He built a successful construction business, and remarried. Then, he says, in the year 2000, he and his wife Cathy “felt God tap us on the shoulder”—and point to the homeless.
“I had been there and done that. I had had an addiction, and I was by most definitions homeless. So my heart was there to help folks, but I had no idea what to do.”

That year, he opened The Carpenter’s Place, a day refuge for Rockford’s down-and-out citizens. Barsema, who has no formal training in social work, applied a building contractor’s methodology to solving the problems of the homeless. He developed a system that coordinated social services for individual clients, with the goal of helping each person build self-sufficiency, not dependency on charity.

“The problem was that so many social service agencies operate out of silos,” Barsema says today. “Until we came along, nobody could keep an eye on each person and his particular needs, and help him get the help he needed to get back on his feet.”

Barsema’s model was so successful that he founded Community Collaboration, Inc., to reproduce it on a wider scale. Today, over 140 agencies in five states use Barsema’s innovative tools and strategies to get homeless folks off the streets and back into life—and 20 more states have expressed interest in adopting this model.

Barsema embarked on his vital new career at a time in life when most people are thinking about retirement. That’s why he was one of five $100,000 winners of the 2010 Purpose Prize, an annual award given by Civic Ventures, a non-profit San Francisco-based think tank, to top achievers in what Purpose Prize founder Marc Freedman calls “encore careers.”

Allan Barsema

Barry Child

Encore careers are professional second acts that combine social entrepreneurship, personal meaning, and measurable social change. Purpose Prize winners are at least 60 years old, and working in a leadership capacity to address a major social problem in the United States or abroad. Ten people annually win the Prize, with five taking home $100,000 awards, and five others landing a $50,000 prize. This year, the fifth of the Purpose Prize program, 46 other encore careerists were recognized as Purpose Prize Fellows.

Inez Killingsworth, 72, another top-rank 2010 honoree, won for her work fighting community-killing home foreclosures in Cleveland, Ohio. Several years ago, she noticed that some of her neighbors weren’t coming to various meetings. When she went to check on them, she found that many had been evicted when the bank took their house in foreclosure proceedings. Killingsworth later discovered that folks could have kept their homes if they had known how to navigate the system, and how to stand up to mortgage holders taking advantage of them.

Killingsworth’s work with her organization, Empowering & Strengthening Ohio’s people, has kept thousands of distressed families in their homes by teaching them how to negotiate successfully with mortgage holders. Says the feisty community activist: “If you have a dream, you should follow it. If you just sit there and do nothing, that’s what’s going to happen to you: nothing. Get up and do something! It doesn’t matter how old you are.”

Margaret Gordon

Inez Killingsworth

Judith Van Ginkel

Other $100,000 winners were Margaret Gordon, a former housekeeper from Oakland, California, who led a fight to protect the health of residents in her environmentally imperiled, low-income community; Barry Childs of Marylhurst, Oregon, whose Africa Bridge organization helps impoverished Tanzanian children by building schools, opening clinics, and starting farming businesses; and Cincinnati’s Judith Van Ginkel, whose Every Child Succeeds program helps thousands of at-risk, first-time mothers and their babies get off to a good start.

The Purpose Prize is not only meant to celebrate the achievements of creative thinkers over 60, but also to spur them to further progress. For example, Killingsworth plans to use part of her prize money to start a program to help ex-prisoners integrate successfully into society. For another, Barsema is putting his award into a new organization, One Body Collaborative, which will help churches and faith-based organizations coordinate their charitable services efficiently and effectively.

“In these difficult times, we don’t have any talent to waste,” says Civic Ventures’ Marc Freedman. “Purpose Prize winners extend a hand to their neighbors, here and across the globe, and offer role models for us all.”

The Purpose Prizes are funded by grant support from the John Templeton Foundation, which has committed over $8 million to the program, and from The Atlantic Philanthropies. The late Sir John Templeton was keen on the value of working into the golden years, and helping those who wanted to keep giving of themselves in the workplace find a way to do so.

The foundation that bears his name was the encore career of Sir John Templeton, who started the Foundation in 1987 at the age of 75, and who stayed intimately involved with its activities until his death two years ago. At the 2010 Purpose Prize awards dinner, held November 13 at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, JTF president and chairman Dr. Jack Templeton shared with winners and their guests a favorite piece of advice from his late father: “Don’t ever retire. You have so much to give.”

In tandem with the Purpose Prize gala, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute honored three Philadelphia area college students as winners of the inaugural Sir John Templeton Noble Purpose Essay Contest. Two students from Eastern University, John Newman and Evan Hewitt, and Villanova student Robert Duffy won the top three awards for their essays reflecting on the qualities of noble purpose.

Educating for Spiritual Growth

College students who apply themselves to spiritual growth do better in school, are happier, and become more effective leaders. So say researchers from UCLA’s Spirituality in Higher Education project in their new book, Cultivating the Spirit: How College Can Enhance Students’ Inner Lives. The book, written by Alexander W. Astin, Helen S. Astin, and Jennifer A. Lindholm, is the culmination of seven years of research, the first national longitudinal study of college students’ spiritual growth.

The study looked at how the religious views and spiritual outlooks of thousands of American students changed over the course of their college careers. Unsurprisingly, researchers found college students often slacked off in formal religious practice. Despite this, they often experienced significant spiritual growth, especially if professors encouraged them to see their education as a chance to discover meaning and purpose.

“We believe that the findings provide a powerful argument that higher education should attend more to students’ spiritual development,” said study co-author Alexander Astin. “Spiritual development is not only an important part of the college experience in its own right, but also promotes other positive outcomes of college.”

UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, the premier organization of its kind in the U.S., conducted the comprehensive study with a $2.1 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation. “During an important time of learning and transition in the lives of many young people, the results of this survey provide strong evidence of the beneficial effects for college students of such activities as self-reflection, meditation and generosity. Sir John thought these were pivotal to the process of spiritual development and self-improvement,” said Christopher Stawski, program officer in human sciences at the Foundation.

Jack Templeton Receives Courage of Belief Award

The American Jewish Committee’s 2010 National Courage of Belief Award went to Jack Templeton, president and chairman of the John Templeton Foundation, in a November 3 ceremony. The annual prize goes to individuals who have achieved, through living out their moral ideals and serving the community, significant and enduring humanitarian improvements in the world.

“Looking at Dr. Templeton’s record of involvement, philanthropy and accomplishment, you can see why the award is so very well-placed,” said Tom Tropp, president of the AJC’s Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey chapter.

Upon receiving the award, Dr. Templeton told the banquet audience at Philadelphia’s Union League Club that he believed both Israel and the United States had special roles in divine providence. He also urged listeners to study the lives of prominent Jewish Americans, and to educate the young about the critical role Jews have played in making the United States a great nation.