President Highlights Innovative Community Solutions
Resource type: News
Encore Careers |
President Obama will meet today with social innovators, including a half-dozen winners of The Purpose Prize who have pioneered solutions to rural poverty, infant mortality and women’s health problems in their encore careers.
The president is expected to challenge philanthropists to expand innovative programs making a difference across the country.
The Purpose Prize winners who will meet Mr. Obama in the East Room of the White House have finished their midlife careers and come back for their encores, recycling their lifetimes of experience into innovative solutions to community problems.
Among the speakers at the White House event will be Robert Chambers, who was 57 when he founded Bonnie CLAC to provide low-income car loans to the rural poor. “I was old enough to understand the injustice I saw and experienced enough to do something about it,” says Chambers, a 2006 Purpose Prize winner. “Given the size of our baby boomer population, it’s time to figure out how to build on all that experience and use it to solve our nation’s most pressing social problems.”
Other Purpose Prize winners invited to the White House are: Gary Maxworthy, who distributes millions of pounds of fresh produce to people in need; Sharon Rohrbach, who provides nurse visits for at-risk newborns; Martha Rollins, who eases prisoner re-entry into the community with job training and support; and Gayle Porter and Marilyn Gaston, who empower African-American women to improve their health.