Retirees Rewarded for Social Entrepreneurship

Joseph Shapiro/NPR

Purpose Prize finalist, Martha Rollins started Boaz and Ruth--an antique shop that sells to the rich and gives jobs to the poor.

Joseph Shapiro/NPR

Ruth Cosby once had difficulty keeping jobs, but now she thrives as a salesperson at an antique shop in Richmond, Va.

The Purpose Prize, sponsored by Civic Ventures, honors what may be a new trend -- retirees taking on some of the country's biggest social problems. The five winners of the Purpose Prize, all 60 years or older, will be announced September 5. The winners split half a million dollars.

The finalists include a used-car salesman who now provides low-interest car loans to the poor, a retired CEO who helps poor kids get to college, and a woman who uses her antique store to give job training to people who have some of the worst job prospects.

Boaz and Ruth

At the very back of an antique and used-furniture store in Richmond, Va., a Toastmasters meeting begins. Here, people get practice at becoming better public speakers.

Most of the twenty-five men and women in the store, seated around a heavy wooden table, have recently come out of prisons.

Off to the side, Martha Rollins sits and listens. She started this place, and now calls it her Robin Hood idea. She already had one antique store, then added this one with the purpose of selling to the rich and giving jobs to the poor.

Not many rich people show up at this store in the inner city. So to keep the place going, Rollins gets grants to hire ex-offenders and help them develop skills, such as speaking in public.

Rollins named this place Boaz and Ruth, after the Bible story of the wealthy landowner who married the homeless and hungry foreigner. Rollins remembers that both of the characters in the story ended up giving to one another.

"Release of gifts. That's what we're really about," Rollins says."It's looking at all the gifts, all the human gifts locked up in prison, waiting to be released. We're about releasing those gifts back to society."

Ruth Cosby, 48, is in the Toastmasters group. She is impeccably dressed in a blue print dress and pearl necklace. Her hair is tied back in a tight bun. She is one of the few at the table who has never been to prison. But she spent years in psychiatric institutions. She's the mother of a 7-year-old daughter. When she came to Boaz and Ruth nearly three years ago, she didn't think she had any talents.

But Martha Rollins helped her discover them.

Rollins put Cosby in charge of the Boaz and Ruth satellite store in downtown Richmond, and both soon saw Collins' talents as a saleswoman.

"Boaz and Ruth gave me a second chance. I would have been dead. I was suicidal, and just didn't want to live," Cosby says. "When I came to Boaz and Ruth, they got me a psychiatrist. They got me into group therapy. And that's why I'm standing here today, because they invested in my life."

Cosby had held more than twenty jobs, and never for a long time. If a boss or a co-worker made a remark she didn't like, or if she had a bad day at work, she'd just walk away and never return. When she tried to walk away from Boaz and Ruth, Martha Rollins showed up at her home.

"What she wanted me to know is, we can bend in life but we don't have to break," Cosby says. "And she taught me a valuable lesson: You don't have to run away all the time. There is help."

Rollins is 63. She doesn't have to be working 80 hours a week, but she started thinking about her life and what she wanted to accomplish.

"Time is drawing shorter. And I have all these things I haven't done and I see all these needs and things that I have some kind of gift or talent I can give to it," Rollins says. "So I just work real fast and I work real hard."