“Encore Years” Celebrated with This Year’s Purpose Prize

VIDEO: The Purpose Prize provides five $100,000 awards to social innovators over 60 in encore careers.

As an attorney in private practice, Thomas Cox became an expert in bankruptcy law and wrote a definitive book on mortgage foreclosures, benefiting his firm’s bank clients. Fast-forward 30 years to 2008 and Cox began a new “career” working pro bono to help individuals whose homes were being seized. His efforts eventually led to $25 billion in settlements for people with negative equity on their properties, or who had already lost their homes to foreclosure.

Cox is one of this year’s winners of the Purpose Prize, a $100,000 award given to social entrepreneurs in their “encore careers”—that is, people over 60 who are using what could be their retirement years to solve critical problems through innovation. As the New York Times stated in an article about the 2012 awards, “The prize, now in its seventh year, has become a sort of MacArthur genius award for people who develop a second career as social service entrepreneurs.”

“Purpose Prize winners are in the midst of solving society’s steepest challenges, from foster care to foreclosure,” says Marc Freedman, CEO and Founder of Encore.org, the organization behind the Purpose Prize. “They underscore that significant social innovation is by no means the exclusive province of the young.”

The other 2012 Purpose Prize winners are:

Bhagwati Agrawal, for supplying safe drinking water—rain from rooftops—to thousands of villagers in his native India, using innovation and his engineering expertise.
Susan Burton, whose work offers women tools for rebuilding their lives after prison—housing, legal services, job training and more—and advocates nationally for such support.
Judy Cockerton, for Intergenerational Innovation, which helps people enrich the lives of foster care kids through innovative programs.
Lorraine Decker, who helps low-income adults and teens acquire the financial, career, and life skills to prosper through free workshops.

Videos in which the winners discuss their work are available online.

The Prize attracted extensive coverage in the media. Speaking to US News, Freedman explained, “From the get-go, we really felt like the epitome of the encore career is kind of a practical idealism.” The Prize is an opportunity to celebrate some of the stories of the many people who are doing this kind of work.

Writing in Forbes, journalist Kerry Hannon said, “It’s exciting and incredibly energizing for me to see people who work under the radar, people who follow a gut sense of what’s right and just and meaningful in this world.” Speaking about her work with foster kids in the Sunday Boston Globe, Purpose Prize winner Judy Cockerton noted, “It’s not about one little non-profit but an entire movement, and it’s really about honoring kids.” The Wall Street Journal reported on the winners as well.

This year, Encore also named 35 Purpose Prize Fellows, who were finalists for the Prize. One new fellow is Gary Slutkin, for his development of the Cure Violence program, which treats the problem of violence by deploying strategies used to control diseases. Patterns of violence are detected and interrupted by identifying routes of transmission and changing the social norms in the communities where it occurs. The model has been trialed in Chicago and Baltimore, and has been rolled out at 50 sites in 15 cities and 7 countries, including South Africa and Iraq.

The Purpose Prize program is funded by an $8 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation and The Atlantic Philanthropies. It is awarded by Encore.org, formerly Civic Ventures, a non-profit that promotes encore careers that are both personally meaningful and serve the greater good.

Sir John Templeton always hoped that the Prize would create a ripple effect of good works, and this has been the anticipated outcome. For example, Cox plans to use his prize money to develop seminars to train more lawyers in Maine about consumer protection work. “The Purpose Prize is doing an extraordinary job demonstrating that Sir John Templeton’s vision of promoting ‘purpose in retirement’ is already a reality for thousands of innovative Americans,” adds Kimon Sargeant, vice president, human sciences at the Foundation.

A panel of 23 judges—leaders in business, politics, journalism, and the non-profit sector—chose the five winners from a pool of more than 800 nominees. An awards ceremony will be held in February in San Francisco. Nominations for the 2013 Purpose Prize will open in January and close in March 2013.

Science and Religion for Schools

VIDEO: The LASAR project was recently featured by the BBC.

Does the Big Bang rule out creation? Can a scientist believe in miracles? Why do natural disasters happen? These are just some of the questions addressed by leading scientists for FaradaySchools.com, a project that helps young people explore issues in science and religion. The project was featured in a recent broadcast news report published on the website of the BBC.

FaradaySchools is part of the Learning About Science and Religion (LASAR) project, a collaboration between the Institute of Education at Reading University and the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, based at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge. Funded by the John Templeton Foundation, LASAR is motivated by a concern that there is a strong public perception that science and religion are opposed to one another and that science is an atheistic activity.

The project conducts research to understand how high school students in the UK think about science and religion, as well as develops materials and approaches to support teachers engaging in the dialogue between science and religion.