Pathways to Purpose in the Encore Years

This project is a collaboration between researchers at Stanford Graduate School of Education and the San Francisco-based non-profit Encore.org. The project has two interconnected aims: to understand better the nature and determinants of purposeful living in the "encore" (post-midlife) years and to use those insights to enable Encore.org, a major provider of purposeful opportunities for encore-stage individuals, to extend its services to a far broader sector of the population. The project includes three parts.

Click here to read an article about this study in the November 4, 2015, GSE News.

Part 1 is a study to be conducted by the Stanford research team which will include a national survey and in-depth interviews to investigate how Americans with varied histories, values, needs, and opportunities make sense of their lives between midlife and old age, what they wish for, and whether they’re able to realize their aspirations. Key questions are whether and how individuals find purpose in this life stage, the nature and sources of that purpose, and implications for their own wellbeing and their contributions to the wellbeing of others.

Part 2 is a data collection effort by Encore.org to create an up-to-date database of existing programs that help people in their later years develop and maintain purposeful lives.

Part 3 is an engagement and implementation phase, which will bring the insights of Part 1 and the resources identified in Part 2 to the general public and to many different kinds of organizations and programs that support purpose in later life. In doing so, Part 3 intends to shift popular conceptions of the encore years and strengthen institutional mechanisms that support many varieties of purposeful aging.

The overall project will yield a better understanding of opportunities for and barriers to purpose, engage larger segments of the population with hopeful, purposeful images of aging, and implement strategies to improve the comprehensiveness and effectiveness of programs that support purposeful aging in widely diverse segments of the population.

Principal Investigator: William Damon
Subcontract Principal Investigator: Marc Freedman, CEO, Encore.org
Project Director, Anne Colby

This project is funded by the John Templeton Foundation.