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To become a certified personal fitness instructor, you have to be at least 18 years old. New Yorker Liliane Kates had that nailed. When she took the exam in 2005, she was well past 65.<\/p>\n
Of course, the rigorous test extended far beyond an age requirement. But Kates, who closed the doors of her boutique employment agency three years earlier, was up for the challenge. Like many of today’s\u00a0retirees<\/span><\/a>, Kates is not the kind of person who can sit around. Instead, many are using their retirement years to pursue a purpose, a passion, or a dream. They want to be engaged intellectually, give back, and find meaning in their own lives in a way they couldn’t during their full-time career days.<\/p>\n\nMany of these retirees\u2014if you can call them that\u2014are working as apprentices or volunteers who receive no pay or minimal compensation. According to a poll by Princeton Survey Research Associates, half of Americans ages 50 to 70 want to find work that has social impact after their primary career ends. Between 5.3 million and 8.4 million Americans ages 44 to 70 have already launched “encore careers,” positions that combine\u00a0income<\/span><\/a>\u00a0with personal meaning and social good, according to a 2008 survey commissioned by the MetLife Foundation and Civic Ventures, a San Francisco-based think tank. “Very few people start a career in retirement purely for the\u00a0money<\/span><\/a>,” says Marc Freedman, founder and chief executive of Civic Ventures and author of\u00a0Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life.<\/em>\u00a0“They’re swapping money for meaning. The old retirement dream was the freedom from work. The new, purpose-focused dream is the freedom to work.”<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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