AARP honors trailblazers with 'flipside of lifetime achievement' award

Older adults as change makers: That has a sweet ring to it.

The AARP Purpose Prize award, which honors people 50 and older who are using their experience and skills to create a better world, was recently presented to seven nonprofit founders and came with a $50,000 prize in recognition and support of their work.

One of this year’s winners, Jennifer Jacobs, 53, a nuclear engineer and former nuclear operations officer for the US Army Reserve, started her pivot 13 years ago when she read an article about foster care and the difficulty of finding a child’s family.

Her years of work focused on nuclear nonproliferation crisscrossed with the intelligence community whose analysts often track and find terrorist networks. As unlikely as it sounds, that experience drew the connection for Jacobs between how similar technology could help foster care professionals find those children’s families.

It didn’t happen quickly, but in 2011, she co-founded Connect Our Kids, a technology nonprofit based in Falls Church, Va., that helps social workers, lawyers, and volunteers to do just that and provide support to both children and their families. The tools are now being used by 2,000 foster care professionals in more than 40 states and Canada.

“Hearing the stories of reconnection and reunion made possible by our tools gives us a daily sense of profound purpose,” Jacobs told Yahoo Finance. “There’s no greater reward.”

FALLS CHURCH, VA - AUG. 12

AARP Purpose Prize winner, Jennifer Jacobs, Co-Founder and CEO ofConnect Our Kids, in Falls Church, Monday August 12, 2024. (Photo by Jared Soares)
AARP Purpose Prize winner Jennifer Jacobs (center) is co-founder and CEO of Connect Our Kids, in Falls Church, Va. (Photo by Jared Soares) · Jared Soares

Practical solutions to societal problems

When the Purpose Prize was launched in 2005, its unofficial tagline was “the flipside of lifetime achievement award.” The idea instead was to invest in what someone over 50 would do next.

“What distinguishes so many of the Purpose Prize winners is not only entrepreneurial intuition, but they’re also practical problem-solvers, rather than wild-eyed dreamers,” said Marc Freedman, co-CEO and founder of social impact organization CoGenerate, the group that created the Prize. “They represent a sense of the possibilities of this stage of life.”

The Prize, now under the auspices of AARP, showcases how older trailblazers are having a positive influence — working in fields such as healthcare, voter education, foster care, and financial empowerment for those who have been incarcerated.

As Jacobs realized, the transition often revolves around redeploying existing experience and skills.

That was true for Jim Ansara, another prize recipient. After Ansara retired and sold his company Shawmut Design and Construction to his employees, he began to look around for what to do next. As he was struggling to figure out the answer, a charitable donation to the global nonprofit Partners In Health led to a trip to Haiti.