community connection

Rosemary Nixon

Founder and Chair Encore Palm Beach County

THEN: Rosemary Nixon’s professional life is sprinkled with transitions and celebrated milestones, crossing lines limiting opportunities for women in the early 1970s. Early in her career, Nixon put her master’s degree in public administration to work while serving as a city planner for a small Connecticut municipality. “It didn’t matter to me that I was doing something I’d never done before,” she says. A short time later, she took on the task of starting an RSVP (Retired Senior Volunteer Program) in Hartford, connecting those 55 and older to volunteer services in the community. Her next challenge was, as its executive director, to rescue a financially floundering Hartford YWCA. Along the way she was recognized as the area’s highest-paid woman business executive. Leaving the nonprofit world for banking in the late 1970s, Nixon again broke barriers, becoming the area’s first female commercial lender. Semi-retiring to Florida in 1994 with the plan to dabble in real estate, Nixon instead ended up landing a job as a financial advisor helping many of her clients plan for retirement.

NOW: Having retired in 2010, Nixon wasn’t sure what the next chapter of her life would look like. She stumbled on a book, Encore by Marc Freedman, about retirees wanting to stay actively engaged through working or volunteering. With that in mind, Nixon became a certified retirement coach, helping older people define their later years. In 2016 she started Encore Palm Beach County, part of a national network of Encore programs, all with the goal of helping people over 50 use their skills and life experiences to improve their communities. With a vibrant website, monthly Zoom educational programs and Nixon’s seemingly endless energy, Encore offers resources for finding job opportunities, provides links to nonprofits looking for volunteers, and recently began connecting groups of retirees to nonprofits that need help. “My life has come full circle,” she says. “While working as a financial planner, I saw that although people knew they had to save for retirement, they needed help visualizing what that retirement would look like. With Encore, we’re connecting people over 50 to new work and volunteer opportunities, because being engaged in community life and purposeful activity is critical to healthy aging.”