Volunteering in Retirement
“In retirement, I thought I'd be relaxing, but instead, I made friends with people who thought 'relaxing' meant organizing events and webinars.”
Gratitude
Like many, I started my retirement journey with a desire to do some volunteer work. While I remain grateful to the volunteer organizations I worked with for their efforts serving the community, I have the most gratitude for how volunteer work can catalyze some lasting friendships!
During COVID, one of my fellow volunteering friends expressed this sentiment about our group’s friendship on a Zoom Happy Hour (remember those? 😜) I totally agreed with her! It turns out our experience together as volunteers is a well-documented one.
“One of the best ways to make new friends and strengthen existing relationships is to commit to a shared activity together. Volunteering is a great way to meet new people, especially if you are new to an area. It strengthens your ties to the community and broadens your support network, exposing you to people with common interests, neighborhood resources, and fun and fulfilling activities.”
— helpguide.org, “Volunteering and its Surprising Benefits”
This quotation described my experience. For this post, I wanted to describe one of these volunteer efforts with a local technology association in more detail, and how it brought together a set of people with common interests!
“Birds of a Feather”
What brought this topic to mind for me was a little event that a friend from this one volunteer group just hosted at his home last week. (Disclaimer: one of the attendees was not one of the volunteers but was later adopted by this group because of his love and knowledge of beer! More on this later!)
This Substack is called “Retired Techie in PDX,” and this volunteer experience we shared brought together people of a similar ilk! (We were “birds of a feather that flock together!”) This group of volunteers formed in 2019, and despite the eventual dissolution of this group in the volunteer organization, we still get together socially in a variety of contexts, most notably for some of us in a weekly beer happy hour. (I’ve mentioned this weekly outing when writing about “Navigating the Friendship Recession” and even included a photo in the post “Exploring Meaning in Retirement”.)
How did we come together?
We got lucky. The CEO of the technology association met several retired tech execs like me and had the vision of getting us all together to launch a new community program which he called “Executives in Residence” (EIR). The concept was three-fold:
Mentorship. The association paired our EIR community as mentors to another community of emerging leaders — senior, individual contributors in member companies. This community, which called itself the “Leadership Launchpad,” consisted of people who weren’t yet in management but were seeking leadership development and mentoring. Pairing the Leadership Launchpad with the EIRs seemed like a great idea, and we had a number of successful interactions pre-pandemic.
Advisory services. As a member benefit, the association also made the EIRs available to leaders of member companies for advisory engagements. We had some great experiences advising numerous business leaders here in Oregon.
Participation in community programming. The association was quite active in holding events bringing together community members. The EIRs served both as different voices in the membership and as ambassadors for the association itself in interacting with the other member companies.
The relationships from this particular volunteer assignment lasted longer than many of the other ones I have engaged in since retirement. I believe the reason for their longevity stemmed from the care taken by the association’s CEO to bring together volunteers with common backgrounds and interests in a cohort.
Our funny name
The group that gets together every week for beers has given itself a funny name. Whenever I see the name “Previous EIR” in our Google Calendar invitations, I am reminded of its origin.
After four years after forming our group, the association decided to recruit a new cohort of EIRs in 2023. In the transition, while promoting the EIR community to recruit this new cohort, the association kept the existing EIR landing page up and simply labeled the page with our bios on it with the title “Previous EIRs.” Of course, non-profit technology associations are always resource-constrained, so this tactical move with the website was understandable. Still, those of us in the “O.G.” cohort were entertained by the label. The name “Previous EIRs” (affectionately) stuck among us!
(I took a screenshot of the website with the treatment of “Previous EIRs” and pasted it at the bottom of the post.
What happened to the EIRs?
Fast forward to 2025. Today, the EIR community no longer exists for this technology association. Eventually, the Leadership Launchpad dissolved, as many of its strongest champions became company management themselves! The association later partnered with a leadership development training company to formalize a development program.
Similarly, the biggest uptake in the business advisory ultimately was for new company founders, rather than established businesses, so the association chose to launch a new initiative for founders investing in founders.
I still participate in the association's community programming. I have attended the Tech in Color programming from time-to-time. Of course, with the recent controversy surrounding DEI, it will be interesting to see how this programming survives. I also continue to volunteer as a judging committee chair for the Oregon Technology Awards.
Lessons Learned
In the context of friendships, retirement gigs can be like work gigs. In the work gig context, my favorite job of all time was with a company (Latitude Communications) that had some definite high periods, including an IPO in 1999, but didn’t prove to be a lasting success. The success of Zoom (and before it, WebEx) eluded Latitude despite our thought-leadership in bringing together voice and web conferencing (more on this later). However, I have valued the friendships I made from that company, and many of the readers of this Substack are friends from that experience starting 30 years ago! I think a key ingredient to the success of the Latitude experience was the care taken by the team to select people who had a set of common interests (in that case, running and cycling!) and could work well together.
The same was true of retirement gigs. I believe there were some good ideas behind a volunteer EIR cohort in a technology association, but it didn’t prove to be a lasting success in this case. Still, I rank this experience on the top of my past retirement volunteer gigs because of both the care taken to select the cohort and the friendships that emerged from it.
I also recognize that power comes from diversity, and any lack of people sharing similar views like me in a group won’t stop me from potentially accepting other types of volunteer positions. I indicated in my New Year’s post that my resolution #3 is to find yet another kind of project. Perhaps another volunteer gig in a totally different arena? I am still putting out the vibrations to the universe that I’m open to new experiences! Let me know if you have thoughts!
Thanks to those who have already answered my semi-annual survey. If you haven’t already responded, I would very much appreciate your feedback. You can visit the survey here.
