By Janine Vanderburg

Last year, I met Marci Alboher at the Encore Careers conference in California, after winning a Civic Ventures Launch Pad award for our concept of training people with sales and marketing background to become nonprofit fundraisers. She and I shared a passion for reinvention—and that the social change sector can benefit from  the talents and experience that people have assembled over a lifetime of work.

At Joining Vision and Action, we’ve nurtured that idea with training programs like Development Director Intensive and Executive Director Academy, deliberately reaching out to people who have already demonstrated leadership in other sectors and providing them with the skills and background for success in the nonprofit sector. While the concept of encore careers has been developed around the boomer generation, it is applicable across generations.

We love the fact that some of Colorado’s most successful nonprofit leaders of all ages—like Mark Kling of the Family Resource Center Association, Lindy Eichenbaum Lent of Civic Center Conservancy, Barbara Raynor of Boomers Leading Change in Health and many more—have participated in our programs as part of their encores.

For those of you who have already decided to make the transition, JVA has three great training opportunities coming up:

• Executive Director Academy, a week long intensive to prepare you for nonprofit executive leadership
• Development Director Intensive a two-day intensive to prepare you for positions in development
• Social Enterprise Basecamp a week long intensive to prepare you to develop a business that marries mission and money

What will your encore be?