The Give-Back Years

By SUSAN AGREST

Colin L. Powell could have done just about anything after he retired as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: head a think tank, sign on as CEO of a big corporation, some say even run for President of the U.S. What he chose to do instead was to help children become happy, productive citizens. By creating America's Promise--the Alliance for Youth, Powell launched a national movement that has historically competitive organizations in the nonprofit sector collaborating for the first time on hundreds of programs.

The difference between General Powell and hundreds of thousands of other recent retirees is that he is more famous. But the range of beneficial services, charitable works and programs contributed to--and often run by--folks who have finished their first careers is worthy of recognition.

In the pages that follow are a few of the inspiring stories we found of compassionate, creative older Americans who are making a difference in their community. We salute them--and all those they represent--this holiday season!

TOM'S NEW TEAM A proven champion signs up for a second season

As head football coach at the University of Nebraska, Tom Osborne had an unusually personal view of the state of American youth. "I'd travel 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 miles a year all over the U.S. to find recruits," recalls Osborne, 61. "On average I visited 70 to 80 high schools and 50 to 60 homes each year. And what I saw were young people who were more and more troubled, carrying more and more emotional baggage; I even saw this increasingly with the young people joining the team."

With an M.A. and Ph.D. in educational psychology--and a winning reputation--Osborne had both the vision and the credentials to do something about it. "It dawned on me that we had a pretty good level of character among the players, and because they are heroic figures to young people, they could make a difference in their lives," he says. Along with his wife Nancy, the coach initiated a mentoring program called TeamMates, pairing 25 of his Cornhuskers with 25 children. The goal was to have these college athletes-cum-mentors stay with their charges from the kids' first year in middle school through the last day of high school. Recalls former offensive guard Steve Volin of his coach: "He always stuck by people who others thought should be tossed in the gutter." The Osbornes kicked off TeamMates in 1991 with $10,000 of their personal savings. Since then, they've contributed $400,000 more, most for college scholarships. Former running back George Achola remembers the day the coach approached the team: "It was obvious this was something dear to him."

The original program promised to finance college for the kids--if they stayed in the program and out of trouble. Eighteen did go on to college; 22 completed TeamMates and 20 graduated from high school. One who made it to college--and onto the football team as a walk-on--was Sean Applegate. "Trouble always seemed to find me," he recalls. With a high school record marred by fights and suspensions, he was an ideal candidate for TeamMates. "I was given a great opportunity to change the direction I was going in," he allows. "Obviously, it's made a dramatic difference."

In 1997 TeamMates underwent its first expansion. Rather than using only collegians as mentors, the Osbornes began recruiting adults from the greater Lincoln community. Lincoln TeamMates now helps 300 students, and since the new wave of mentors are older and more firmly rooted in town, they can stick with their proteges longer than many Huskers could.

This summer the Osbornes announced they were taking TeamMates statewide, bringing as many as 400 more children into the program next year. Scholarships can no longer be guaranteed, however. "We have to rely on the communities to decide what level of funding they'd be willing to give," says Osborne. "On the other hand, even if a kid has a problem, we wouldn't pull out on someone."

Among TeamMates' newest mentors are the Osbornes themselves. When he stepped down as Husker coach last January, Osborne teamed up with Benjamin Warren, who will celebrate his 14th birthday the Sunday before Christmas. And Nancy Osborne, 59, has been mentoring Shamykka Divers, 11, for three months.

"No one is without redemption," said Tom Osborne in a sermon he gave at his church last year. "If you are told all your life that you don't measure up, and then if you are told you are a child of God and of inestimable worth, you can transcend environment and circumstances." Osborne led the Cornhuskers to 255 victories in his 25 years as coach. He'd love it if TeamMates produced a few champions too.

CAPTAIN PROJECT The Sage of Jersey spreads a green gospel

Carl L. Henn has learned a lot in his 75 years. He earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in business administration, management and international economic development, largely courtesy of the U.S. Navy, at Northwestern University, Harvard Business School and George Washington University. Highlights of his naval career include participation in the Berlin airlift and nuclear submarine duty under Admiral Hyman Rickover. Henn retired with the rank of captain, then went on to become a corporate planner for American Standard, a broker at Shearson Lehman Hutton and finally an oil-and-gas industry analyst. Yet it is his view that lifelong learning is "simply not enough."

"We need to engage in concurrent learning," says Henn, now living in New Brunswick, N.J., where he is devoting the winter of his life to using lessons from the military-industrial complex to help others understand life on our planet as a complex web of interrelated--and thus interdependent--systems. Making the connections, says Henn, will "change the way we make decisions," which in turn "will change the decisions we make."

Henn had his educational epiphany 10 years ago. "Reading industry journals, I was awakened, really for the first time, to the adverse impacts industry was having on our environment," he says. That insight set the course for his retirement years. He began bringing together people from industry, education and government so that they might learn about one another's systems and decision-making processes, allowing them to integrate this new knowledge into their business practices.

In the decade since, Henn has renewed lapsed memberships at the Harvard Business School Club of Greater New York and the Harvard Club of New York City and started an environmental lecture series there that ran from 1991 to '94. A few years later, he asked a former president of the business school club to join with him and a New Jersey school superintendent in a project for fifth-grade students: using their math, geography and social studies knowledge, the students were to design alternative modes of transportation for New Jerseyans commuting to Manhattan's World Trade Center. It was but one of several Linking Industry Nature Knowledge & Systems projects Henn would initiate with the school superintendent.

Henn also joined a multitude of professional organizations, using them as platforms for further projects. He created an environmental division at SOLE--the International Society of Logistics, which generated workshops and conferences on "green" design and accounting practices. At the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Brad Allenby, V.P. for environment, health & safety for AT&T worldwide, found Henn effective in helping technicians design with the environment in mind. In turn, Henn got Allenby to lecture twice: once at the Harvard Club and again for an industrial ecology course that Henn designed and taught for undergrads at Rutgers University. Also at the I.E.E.E., Henn met Clinton Andrews--now an assistant professor for urban planning at Rutgers, but at the time on the faculty at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Last year Andrews and Henn co-chaired a conference at Princeton. "The idea was to inspire Jersey's K-12 educators to embrace an integrative approach to learning and move away from structuring class time into segregated disciplines," explains Andrews. "Another goal was to influence policymakers to integrate environmental issues into the core curriculum of public schools." That conference led to a three-day symposium this past summer at Ramapo College of New Jersey on the same subject for public school teachers and administrators.

It is a most unusual volunteer career. But Henn is an unusual man. Lawrence Mondschein, manager of environmental affairs for Johnson & Johnson, calls him "a visionary," and Rob Young, executive director of New Jersey's Office of Sustainability (created by Governor Christine Whitman last year to encourage ecologically friendly business in the state) proclaims Henn "a sage."

He's not slowing down. Currently he's chairing the City of New Brunswick's environmental commission, and Andrews, who was just awarded a National Science Foundation grant to map the pathways of Trenton pollutants, got Henn named as an adviser. "He gets to donate his insights for free; in turn he is allowed to try and leverage me for one of his next projects," says Andrews. And there will be more projects.

FREUDENBERG'S LIST A durable emigre breaks the language barrier

Which of the many problems in our community that Margot Freudenberg has identified and just thrown herself into rectifying would you like to talk about?" asks James B. Edwards, president of the Medical University of South Carolina. "She's a captivating lady who is a stalwart in the community. Everything that is good here, she has been a part of."

How about the volunteer project she began in 1957 and still runs today: her Foreign Language Interpreters' List--a directory of 200 Charlestonians who read, write and speak 53 foreign languages and who provide emergency translation services free of charge to hospitals, police and schools?

"Ah, with that particular one, she's a real star," says Edwards.

If you live in Charleston, S.C., Margot Strauss Freudenberg, 91, is no less a legend than Fort Sumpter or Rainbow Row, though she arrived in Charleston in 1940, a humble immigrant from Hannover, Germany. Trained as a physical therapist, she established a private practice and worked at clinics and hospitals. In 1957 at the city's Roper Hospital, a doctor on rounds couldn't communicate with a critically ill Dutch sailor and enlisted her as a translator. The sailor didn't understand Freudenberg's German any better than he did the doctor's English. Alarmed by the incident, Freudenberg went on local radio and television and appealed for help. A Dutchman working in town responded. With his help, the illness was diagnosed as multiple sclerosis, and the sailor was flown back to Holland.

"The thought that foreigners could possibly die in a hospital here because of a language barrier haunted me," she recalls. Within a few months she had produced her first translators' list. Often consulted, it is now published on the Internet. "Thousands of people have been assisted by the list since its inception," estimates Barbara Vaughn, public information director for Charleston. Translators have helped Cuban boat people stranded in port, sick Mexican migrant workers who couldn't communicate with hospital staff, Vietnamese schoolkids who couldn't understand instructions and a Norwegian sailor who ran away from a hospital, scared that his ship would leave without him.

The service is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and, it seems to Freudenberg, her calls "always come at midnight." (Generally a police car picks her up and takes her where she is needed.) She updates the list every 18 months, finding translators on her walks in town as readily as she does phoning area schools. In 1959 she told Charleston's News and Courier: "I have got so much satisfaction and happiness by trying to help people in distress. This is my repaying of my debt [to America]."

ACE OF HEARTS A retired judge creates a volunteer force for seniors

Residents of Sacramento County, Calif., are likely to have heard of ACE (Aide Corps for the Elderly). It recruits and deploys volunteers to work with 35 public and private agencies that serve the frail elderly residents of the county. There are ACE public service spots on radio and TV, ads and articles in community newspapers and ACE open houses; its recruitment tables in shopping malls and community centers are piled high with red, white and blue ACE pamphlets listing some of the good works its volunteers perform. People respond. Most, however, are looking for help, not offering it.

The supply-demand imbalance is testimony to the dire need ACE was created to meet. Its volunteer force of 110 must cope with an age 85-plus population that at last count totaled 18,541--a 92% surge since 1990. It is also testimony to the vision of ACE's founder, Leonard M. Friedman, 84, a former attorney and a retired associate justice of the California court of appeal.

Fourteen years ago, after two elderly sisters in the care of county workers were found starved to death, Judge Friedman was asked by the county board of supervisors to join a panel charged with investigating services to the aged. Within a year, Friedman and others on the panel had created a model system of programs to replace the one that had failed the hapless women. But in 1992, budget cutbacks forced its cancellation. Friedman quickly countered by launching ACE, a consortium of six agencies that agreed collaboratively to close the gap in services the county would no longer provide. Trained by the agencies they work for, volunteers perform many tasks--from phoning shut-ins to assisting in the mediation of disputes or investigating allegations of abuse in board-and-care facilities and nursing homes.

Though too few in number ("The agencies tell us they could easily make use of 300," says Friedman.), ACE volunteers enjoy a reputation for being well screened and well prepped before they are placed. Public confidence is likely to grow even more now that five-year-old ACE has procured its first grant. Last month, with $23,879 from a local foundation, ACE began offering its recruits 15 hours of professional training in how to identify physical and mental-health problems in the population they serve.

THE GANG OF THREE Their free time will help fill kids' after-school hours

While most people are making lists of gifts to buy kith and kin this holiday season, three generous souls in Kennett Square, Pa., have been reviewing final plans for a brand-new after-school program, scheduled to open in January. John and Denise Wood, both 81, and Marshall Newton, 66, have been recruiting fellow retirees, along with high school and college students, to serve as volunteer instructors in a range of after-school activities--including computer sciences, drama, entrepreneurship, sewing, sculpture, chess and dance--for the greater Kennett community's middle school children.

The need for such a program in Kennett Square, home of a thriving mushroom industry that has drawn an ethnically diverse population of 22,000, was revealed to Denise Wood and Marshall Newton while they were working on a three-year community quality-of-life survey sponsored by their church. One of the recurring laments heard on taped interviews conducted by Newton, a former financial manager for DuPont, was the lack of activities for children between the end of the school day and the time parents return home from work.

"The time of greatest danger and needs for youth in Kennett, as in other communities across America, is between the hours of 3 and 6 p.m.," says Denise, a former dean of students at a college-preparatory school in Los Angeles. Joined by Denise's husband John, Newton and Wood launched plans for an after-school program, to be based at the Kennett Middle School, whose population of 540 students (18% Hispanic, 7% African American, 2% Asian and remainder white) was a microcosm of the community itself.

The three designed their proposal last winter and presented it to the school-district superintendent in May. Within three months, the district had approved it. This fall, the triumphant triumvirate filed for nonprofit status and formed a board of directors. The board appointed Liz Anderson, an eighth-grade teacher and hockey coach, as executive director. Anderson, 27, is technically young enough to be the Woods' granddaughter. "From the first time they met, Liz and Denise have been clicking," says Kennett Middle School principal John Carr.

"The beauty of the program is that it won't cost the school board or taxpayers anything," says John Wood, who headed fund raising at the Braille Institute in Los Angeles before he retired. The trio has tapped foundations and private donors for the $50,000 they have budgeted for 1999--mostly to pay the salary of Anderson and a program coordinator. The rest is a gift--from one generation to another.