Retirees volunteer their expertise abroad
Adults with experience not ready to shelve skills turn to projects overseas
A whole generation is reaching retirement age, and many of them aren’t content with chasing the sun or hosting grandkids. People who’ve had active careers, often in the white-collar sector, aren’t keen on wasting all that experience. Luckily, there are organizations willing to bring both travel and philanthropy to such high-achieving retirees.
When Nadine Copf retired after a career working in sales and marketing for pharmacy giants such as Johnson & Johnson, she joined an informal group that went shopping around for opportunities to offer their skills. She ended up at the Canadian Executive Service Organization (CESO), a 50-year-old charitable organization that matches volunteers with economic development projects all over the world.
“Do you really want to stuff envelopes?” recalls Copf, who is from Windsor, Ont., but has been living in Toronto for many years. “Well, maybe. But sometimes you spend your career developing skills and you think, ‘How can I take all that work gaining experience and developing skills and then just walk away from it?’ For me, that was a consideration.
“When I saw how I could take those skills and then give them to people who need to develop in that area, increase their business maturity, that’s what turned me on to it. The variety of needs out there is just incredible.”
Since starting work with CE- SO as a volunteer adviser, she has travelled to places such as Peru, Colombia and Kazakhstan to offer her assistance to a fashion academy, a municipal tourism bureau and a business school. These postings have given her an opportunity to test the Spanish she’s been learning since she retired — “My antiAlzheimer’s strategy,” she says — and assist local businesses who need help overcoming problems in logistics, marketing or organization.
“I’m not a hotel specialist or a customer-service specialist, but I’ve done a lot of training and a lot of marketing,” she says. “You come to a situation (and) you understand where the individuals are at and where they want to be.”
Katrina Beck left Nova Scotia when she was 23 and couldn’t find a teaching job in the province. She ended up overseas, living in seven countries during her career as a teacher before retiring back home to Bridgewater, N.S., where she hooked up with Projects Abroad, a British company that recruits volunteers to work on aid and development projects around the world.
Like Copf, she says she hadn’t done much volunteer work before retiring, and says there’s a lot to learn as a volunteer, even if you’re working in fields where you’ve had a career’s worth of experience.
“You aren’t going there to change the world, so you need to be open-minded to how things are,” Beck says. “You may think you are going there for the people, but actually you are the one who will learn more about life outside of Canada and about yourself. If you’re lucky, like in my case, you remain in contact with some of the host families.”
Beck has worked on projects in Peru, Romania, Sri Lanka, Costa Rica and Mongolia, and remembers them all with fondness.
“I was so welcomed by the school in Mongolia. I ran an English club for the teachers and taught a class. The staff was so kind they had a birthday party for me.”
Volunteer work abroad is often seen as literally ground-up labour — digging wells or assist- ing with vaccinations or building homes for Habitat for Humanity, but there are a remarkable number of skills needed in developing nations. Copf says it’s not just the skills but the personalities you find in senior management that are most useful in these places.
“Do I want to do fundraising, do I want to use skills I’ve learned throughout my career? It’s important for CESO to get an individual who’s the right fit for them, and vice versa. There are a couple of things they look for. One is people who have the skill sets for the projects that they do — they might be infrastructure or business or marketing. Secondly, people who are more senior management like to work independently, and they do work independently here.”
Like Beck, Copf says curiosity and flexibility are the keys to adapting and thriving in the situations you might be sent to.
“The local clients are really keen to have an adviser come in and are incredibly welcoming and respectful. They commit a lot of their time and resources to make the project successful. They always ask for more and want you to do more.”
There’s no shortage of places that need experienced help, and Copf thinks we’re in a unique situation right now to provide the sort of people who can provide that help.
“People are retiring at 55 with 30 to 40 years of a healthier, more active lifestyle. You go from being a productive person getting up in the morning and delivering, doing, being in meetings and all of a sudden you’re done and you have to rethink who are you now, and how you’re going to fill your time.”