Living within your New Call:

Discovering Vocational Joy In Retirement

A vocational discernment program for “Seeking Seniors.”

“Recently retired at a relatively young age, I’d like to discern my next steps to leading a meaningful life of service to others.”
“I am hoping to get a sense of how…I can serve in the senior years of my life. I will be 75 in November and keep feeling drawn to do something, serve in some way, but realistically what might that path be?”
“I’m at retirement age, but financially need to keep earning income… In this important time of my life, I’m wondering how I might change how I earn…How can I discern a new path to fulfill my growing desire to serve with personal meaning and purpose.”

BHFH is piloting a Vocational Discernment peer retreat offered specifically for “Seeking Seniors” who are exploring how they are now called in this distinctive time of life.

In an article on the National Career Development Association’s website, Nick Gowen writes: “Finding meaning in life can often hinge in part on the benefits that work provides, such as feeling useful and exercising one’s skills and talents. Retired older adults, then, must find new ways to conceptualize and achieve these benefits of work in retirement.”

As older adults, we each need space to discern how we are now personally called to “be” in our world. With changing priorities, how can we each now best use our gifts, talents and abilities to find new means of personal fulfillment? How can we continue to enrich society from our availability, experience and wisdom? What new paths, new purposes, new joys might yet be discovered?

The BHFH Vocational Discernment Program uses Quaker practice and reflection to help people explore exactly these things: How to remain useful in the world by best using one’s seasoned skills, gifts, and leadings. How to discern your right next step!

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

- Howard Thurman, minister and theologian

With all you have individually become, which parts of yourself do you most want to hold now — the parts you want to keep most alive and active?

If your life journey has already spanned more than a half a century 😀, and you want to explore these questions of a New Call — this peer retreat/workshop adventure is for you!

Join our free upcoming online event:

Invite our workshop to your community

Thanks to funding from the Friends Foundation for the Aging, we are able to offer this workshop for free to a small number communities around the country.

Please contact us by phone at (617) 227-9118 or email (see below) to invite our workshop to your community.

Send us an email

Invite us!

What prior participants have said:

"The [Clearness] Committee process was fabulous. I went away with questions I had not considered previously."

I am taking away "[t]hat aging looks the same in many ways, even though the life experiences may look different. There is the concern about limitations, energy, and health concerns that impact us more in the aging process than we could have imagined"

I am taking away, "some good queries about my own upcoming choices, some areas to explore, and a understanding that others share my unsureness about what we can change and what we need to adapt to as we age."

"There are certainly many different paths to consider for those of us who are retired and it helps to discuss with others who have a fresh and/or different perspective."

This work is made possible by the generous support of Friends Foundation for the Aging.

Core Facilitators

Greg Woods is a skilled facilitator and workshop leader with more than 15 years of experience. Since 2020, Jen Newman and he have developed and refined the Living Your Call: Vocational Discernment program. He has worked in ministry for a variety of Quaker organizations and served as a founding board member for Quaker Voluntary Service. Greg is also an accomplished writer with numerous articles in Friends Journal and chapters in the Cambridge Companion to Quakerism and The Quaker World. Currently, he serves as a Program Consultant for Beacon Hill Friends House. He holds degrees from Earlham College and Princeton Seminary.

Glenna McKitterick is a Quaker, Interfaith Chaplain, thanatologist, and long-time activist/educator for Health Care Rights and Aging. Working 40 years in her passions, she pioneered in hospice education and counseling, and then served in her congregational Ministry. Glenna answered her own “Senior Call,” to combine these dedications — and is still serving in Interfaith Chaplaincy specializing in Healthcare, Hospice and Aging. For 20 years, she has also given workshops she created: “Finding and living our personal gifts and ministry.” As Program Fellow this year with BHFH, Glenna describes her work as a “spiritual harmonic convergence — bringing forth new meaning and purpose to so much of what I have learned and loved.”

Jennifer Newman is a Quaker, theologian, writer, activist, and the Executive Director at Beacon Hill Friends House. Formerly the Program Director for BHFH, she has facilitated more than 100 workshops to diverse, ecumenical audiences, where she focuses her facilitation on interactive and experiential spaces, using Quaker principles and practices in ways that help audiences connect with their own inner wisdom. She is a member of Beacon Hill Friends Meeting, New England Yearly Meeting, holds a Master of Theological Studies from Vanderbilt Divinity School, and spent several years working in advocacy around human rights, the public interest, and the environment before coming to BHFH. In addition to her work, Jen is a regular contributor for the Barclay Press Illuminate series.

Additional Partners

Judah Leblang is a Boston-area writer, teacher and storyteller. His essays and commentaries have been broadcast on 200 NPR and ABC-radio network stations around the US, and his memoir vignettes and essays have been published in McSweeney’s online, WBUR’s Cognoscenti, Medium, and in regional publications in Boston and his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. He writes the ‘Life in the Slow Lane’ column in Bay Windows, Boston’s LGBT newspaper. His latest one-man show, “It’s Now or Never: My Life in the Late Middle Ages,” (Best of Festival, Calgary Fringe 2019) was called “intriguing” by Winnipeg’s Jewish Post, while the (Winnipeg) Free Press described him as a “great communicator.” He was also a featured teller on The World Channel’s (PBS) Stories from the Stage in February 2023.