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Submitted by admin on Fri, 2010-06-25 12:37
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Retirees can use career skills to volunteer

Sun 11 Oct 2009
Janet Kidd Stewart
 
Steve Mercer spent 35 years with General Electric and Boeing, mostly developing executive talent jobs. Now, he's developing the math skills of a fifth-grader.
 
Barbara Zavodny, a senior benefits manager for a major food company for nearly two decades, now counsels Medicare recipeints about benefit options.
 
Two years after taking an early retirement package for Hewlett-Packard, former marketing vice president Gina Cassinelli is working part time for a small stipend on a marketing campaign for a program to boost academic achievement in low-income middle-school students.
 
Dr. Steve Webster now helps lead an organization that gets medical care to patients who fall between the cracks of private insurance and public aid.
 
Likea a lot of retirees, these 50- and 60-somethings had a vague desire to stay engaged. They made a successful jump to volunteering with a disciplined focus on transferring their career skills to a new venture.
 
Transfer skills
 
After developing executive talent, Mercer retired in 2004 and moved with his wife, Ning, to northern California from St. Louis. Troubled by reports that non-English-speaking kids were falling behind in school, he considered teaching English as a second language.
 
Then he noticed and article about Experience Corps (experiencecorps.org) looking for volunteers to teach reading and math. He called them, and with his engineering background, Mercer was put to work tutoring kids in math.
 
Now, twice a week, Mercer works with a fifth-grader.
 
"THe hardest thing is getting kids motivated," he said, which is where he executive talent training comes into play. For his student, who loves football, he invented a game where the student can move the ball (a coin) down a hand-drawn field as he solves math problems correctly.
 
"You know you helped somebody tkae a step forward," Mercer said.
 
Hands-on
 
When Zavodly, 63, retired a little more that a year ago, she knew sitting at the beach wasn't going to do it.
 
She stopped at a booth for Baltimore County volunteers as a senior expo and said she just retired from a corporate benefits management job.
 
"He immediatly asked when I could start," she said. Explaining Medicare benefit options to seniors takes knowledge few people have, so Zavodny knew she'd make and immediate impact.
 
Consider it a job
 
Cassinelli, 52, heard through a friend about the Silicon Valley Encore Initiative, a pilot program sponsored by her former employer that matches recnet retirees with select non-profit groups. She said working on the campaign for schools has energized her as much as any of her jobs.
 
"I know it's hard to bridge both worlds," she said of the corporate and non-profit sectors. "There's distrust on both sides."
 
Pace yourself
 
DUring a career capped by a stint as chief of surgery for Kaiser Permanente's Oakland Medical Center in California, Webster volunteered often.
 
Today, at 61, he's a board member and active in Operation Access, a San Francisco network of medical professionals that donates outpatient surgical procedures to underinsured patients.
 
It's important not to burn out early in retirement, he said. "It's a great relief for me to have more free time," he said, by guarding against signing up for too much. "Start with just a few hours a week and you can always build from there."
 
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