Labor Day has always felt like New Year’s Day to me. It’s the school calendar that continues to promise new possibilities. This year they include a new project, some especially interesting trips, and wonderful news from several of my writer friends.

I am going to Billings, Montana to give the keynote at the first Annual Exceptional Women Luncheon on September 17. I am especially delighted to be there because, in addition to the opportunity to celebrate terrific women, the event will be co-sponsored by the brand new Billings chapter of The Transition Network, an organization I have admired and supported since its earliest days.

Suzanne Braun Levine
Encore.org

One of the most persistent and misguided assumptions about the relationship of younger and older workers is that they are adversaries – competing for the same jobs and incompatible in work habits. This presumption of intergenerational hostility ignores the productive synergy that happens when their skills and work styles mix and energy meets experience, technological fluency meets accumulated people skills, ambition meets not sweating the small stuff.

Suzanne Braun Levine
Encore.org

Last week I spent an exhilarating evening exploring the Encore message with Marci Alboher and close to 200 people who had come to the New York Public Library to find out more about her book The Encore Career Handbook. In our presentation, Marci covered the nuts and bolts of how to envision and find work that matters to you in the second half of life, and I tried to connect the Encore Movement with the Women’s Movement – in which I have spent both halves of my working life.

Back in 1972, when I signed on at Ms. magazine, our mission was to document the history women were making every day. Early detractors, like newsman Harry Reasoner, dismissed those efforts by pronouncing the material too sparse to sustain a magazine for more than a few issues. But Ms. kept on filling its pages. It became the place to find out about women athletes, women scientists and executives as well as the brave rebels who were speaking truth to power — women who went unremarked in the rest of the media.

Also unremarked were women whose accomplishments had been lost to history, because no matter how awe-inspiring a woman’s story would have been if she were a man, it was rarely deemed worth including in the record of human accomplishments; if it had been suggested back in the seventies, the phrase “women’s history” would have been considered an oxymoron.

Encore.org, second acts
for the greater good

When Barbara Young courageously transformed herself from immigrant nanny into passionate advocate, she launched an encore career with the power to change the lives of domestic workers across the United States.

In 2001, when Barbara Young signed up for a nanny training class in New York City, she didn’t realize how it would set her on the path for her encore career. She simply thought taking a certificate program could help her acquire extra skills, like CPR. She took pride in her work looking after a six-week-old baby round the clock, and was thirsty for knowledge. “I figured it would be really good for me,” Young says.

by Marc Freedman
Founder and CEO
Encore.org

It’s a great honor to unveil the stories of our seven inspirational Purpose Prize winners for 2013. These individuals come from all walks of life, but hold one thing in common: each is changing the world in what was once seen as the ‘leftover’ years. Through this important work they are simultaneously transforming perceptions about what is possible when the power of social innovation is joined with the unique value of experience. These winners are at the vanguard of a large and growing movement of individuals in their encore years helping to solve many of the toughest problems facing our nation and the world today.

Suzanne Braun Levine
National Girlfriends Day
Huff/Post 50

Girlfriends Day is a great idea. It invites us to search for the words and gestures that can only begin to acknowledge the importance of our own precious “circle of trust.” Moreover, unlike the other designated days of honor, this one isn’t about one person; it is about the alchemy that binds women together.

I’m celebrating National Girlfriends Day, Thursday, Aug. 1 on Huff/Post50 with a new post: “GIRLFRIEND POWER – Your Post-Fifty Posse Can Change the World.” It will have a slide show featuring women friends, women and girls exercising their power, videos and popular quotes from my ebook You Gotta Have Girlfriends. I believe that work and women working together are among the greatest gifts of the Women’s Movement. My years at Ms. magazine taught me that girlfriends give each other the courage to do things we could not have done alone.

Suzanne Braun Levine
Encore.Org

Recently, I spent an exhilarating evening exploring the Encore message with Marci Alboher and close to 200 people who had come to the New York Public Library to find out more about her book The Encore Career Handbook. In our presentation, Marci covered the nuts and bolts of how to envision and find work that matters to you in the second half of life, and I tried to connect the Encore Movement with the Women’s Movement – in which I have spent both halves of my working life.

By Suzanne Braun Levine
Huff/Post 50

In her widely debated new book Lean In, Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg called it “the ultimate chicken and egg situation.” She is talking about the endless back and forth about what is holding women back from Having It All, whether the system needs to change in order for women to get ahead or whether women need to get ahead to change the system.