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For Retirees, a Journey of Many Returns
February 3, 2005, The Boston Globe

By ANGELICA MEDAGLIA

The way Ben and Judy Sands managed to take 2,000 pounds of peanut butter, blonde Barbie dolls, crayons, and clothing to the Dominican Republic last month could have passed for a brilliant smuggling scheme.

Without government permission to ship the goods by air, the North Reading couple recruited 200 swimmers -- members of nine college swimming teams from such schools as Tufts, Brandeis, Northeastern, and Rutgers -- to carry much of the haul. The rest, two wheelchairs and couches, they handled themselves.

In the Dominican Republic, orphaned girls played with the dolls, children of Haitian families working in sugar cane plantations received the crayons, a child whose mother used to carry him to school received one wheelchair, and a woman who had suffered a stroke received the other.

The tactics and accomplishments of the Sandses are extraordinary. But their efforts to do good in the world represents a phenomenon that is spreading among retirees. And as the baby boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964, prepare for retirement, a network of people and institutions is developing to help them use their retirement years productively.

"People are living longer and healthier than in the past. People don't retire and go and play golf for 10 years and then die," said Nancy Wilson, director and associate dean of Tufts University's College of Citizenship and Public Services. "They say, 'I am finally at a stage where my life is flexible, I want to keep it that way. I don't want to spend all year traveling, or all year grandparenting. I want to spend time once a month, go overseas once a month to do some meaningful work.'

"And Ben Sands is a classic example. He has committed once a year to do these trips; now he's doing it two or three times a year."

Tufts has begun a program to reach as many of its 80,000 alumni in their 40s, 50s, and 60s and steer them to civic engagement locally and worldwide. The university recently launched the program and hopes to establish a kind of career center to help baby boomers with their next calling.

Similar initiatives are sprouting up around the region. The Center for Health Communication at the Harvard School of Public Health last month began a campaign that promotes mentoring relationships between youths and baby boomers. In addition, a group of professionals has formed the Massachusetts Life Planning Network to devise ways of providing aging baby boomers "purposeful direction" for their lives.

In this regard, the Sandses are leading the way. Several years ago, they learned about Airline Ambassadors, a nonprofit group formed by airline industry employees who used passengers and unused aircraft space to transport goods to people in need.

With the group, the Sandses helped take 80 boxes of clothes to El Salvador in a 2000 trip, and a total of 18 duffel bags of goods to Guatemala in two separate trips. Last month's trip to the Dominican Republic, however, was their independent venture.

The whole thing ran on a shoestring. Judy bought 24-crayon boxes at 25 cents each at the beginning of the school year at Wal-Mart, and purchased toys at church fairs. Ben devised the way to assign the goods to the Tufts swimming team, but then the travel agent booking the team's tickets had the idea to enlist others.

"It quickly took a life of its own," said Ben, 71, a retired hockey coach at Tufts. "And now that we have made so many contacts there, we will continue doing it.

Judy, 69, hopes to do a couple of trips a year. "I do it because I've had a happy, good life and I am just interested in giving back as much as I can, and I find it very fulfilling. I think that the people that go on these trips get more out of it than the people they are helping."

That sentiment was on display at a warehouse in Amesbury. There, retired nurses and doctors packed used medical equipment for shipment to hospitals and medical facilities in 56 countries -- places most of them have never seen. Out of the 2,500 volunteers for the Amesbury-based International Medical Equipment Collaborative, 10 percent are older than 65, and people in that age group are the most likely to donate a day of their week -- which is higher than average -- to help out, officials of the organization said.

"We love it here. The need is so great," said Ann Freeze, a 68-year-old retired nurse who started volunteering at the collaborative with her husband seven years ago. Freeze said there's no special reason why she and her husband continue to pack dressings and suction tubes in boxes every Wednesday, miles away from their home in Rye, N.H. "We just feel that it is worthwhile to volunteer as much as we can."

Harvard's School of Public Health, meanwhile, is marking the first wave of baby boomers turning 60 with the publication of a guidebook on how to live a meaningful life after retirement.

"Volunteering keeps people socially connected. It can replace sort of the camaraderie of the workplace" once a person retires, said Susan Moses of the School of Public Health.

The school, which received a $1.7 million grant for the project, will also talk to newspapers and publications on covering age-related topics, and to the entertainment industry on its portrayal of older people, said Moses.

Looking at the demographics eight years ago, Meg Newhouse foresaw the needs of aging baby boomers. "This transition in life has its own special characteristics," she said. "It doesn't exclude career . . . but there is more of an emphasis and focus on finding meaning, and there is more of an effort on giving back."

Newhouse founded in 2003 the Massachusetts Life Planning Network, where groups of professionals discuss ways to develop a guide for post-retirement living.

"Baby boomers are a huge population full of potential," Newhouse said, "used to kind of rewriting the rules, and now rewriting rules of traditional retirement and using this period to give back to the community, to express themselves in really creative ways, and really being able to change the social bias against aging by their example."

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