Finding Fulfillment Working with SAGE
As part of SVP Portland, the Encore Fellows program provides a source of expertise for nonprofit organizations, helps individuals (Fellows) transition from their careers into social-purpose work, and gives corporations a new way to positively impact their communities. Encore Fellows who have retired from a career are matched with host nonprofit organizations based on their passions, skills, and experience.
Diane Dickoff retired from Intel after a 30-year engineering career in August 2020. While she had the important role of grandmother to her seven-year-old grandson who did Zoom school from her house, she was also looking for a way to use her project management and computer software skills in retirement. Senior Advocates for Generation Equity (SAGE) was a good fit for her Encore Fellowship because it allowed her to use her skills and gave her the flexibility to work from home and continue to care for her grandson. Diane shares, “I brought my past experience to help them understand from an outsider and older-generation person what would be helpful in their surveys, documents, emails, and website.”
SAGE is a unique organization that motivates volunteerism through grassroots conversations and leadership development, so that older adults engage in causes that are vital to the needs of children and youth. SAGE supporters are guided by generational equity–the principle that each generation should improve the quality of life for the next–as they organize to achieve substantive goals in education, environment, and economic opportunity. Each year, SAGE’s goal is to inspire, support, and equip over 1,000 people to give forward.
Although Diane had to transition from a fast-paced engineering environment to a small nonprofit where all conversations were conducted through Zoom, she learned more about the organization, what SAGE hoped to accomplish, and how she could leverage her skills to help. As a Fellow, she used her project management skills to document SAGE’s processes and provide security support for the documents. Additionally, she used her computer software skills to create productive and informative surveys, and then integrate them into SAGE’s database. Diane reflects, “I found that to show them what is possible with software and automation was more helpful than just talking about the possibilities. We had several options after investigations and worked through all of them to get the best option with the least overhead.”
As a trusted team member, Diane also met with SAGE leadership to discuss how to expand the organization by bringing in more volunteers and donations. “One of the biggest problems we worked through was the goal that SAGE inspire people. How do you document inspiration? What does SAGE mean to different people? How do we get those whom SAGE has inspired to help inspire others?” By telling her story of working with SAGE as an Encore Fellow, Diane has done just that!