Changing Lanes to Make a Difference - Jennifer Jacobs

What's Next?  Get in front of your life in retirement. Early Bird registration is now open for our upcoming Designing Your New Life Group Program Join a supportive, dynamic community to reimagine your path and create a meaningful retirement. Choose from two groups: Thursday (6pm ET) or Friday (12 pm ET), both starting in January. 🔹 Limited Spots Available! Each group is capped at 10 participants. Don’t miss your chance to join at a discounted rate—secure your place now and start 2025 with intention and connection. Learn more ___________________ How can redirect your skills and expertise in different ways following your career? AARP Purpose Prize winner Jennifer Jacobs, CEO and co-founder of not-for-profit Connect Our Kids,  shares her inspiring story of how she made a shift to improve lives. Her story highlights how encountering problems that your skills and experience can help to solve may lead you to a second act endeavor. Jennifer Jacobs joins us from Virginia. ____________________ Bio 2024 AARP Purpose winner Jennifer Jacobs, PhD is the CEO and co-founder of Connect Our Kids, a technology non-profit revolutionizing the way America finds families for children in foster care. Under her leadership, Connect Our Kids has developed innovative tools that help child welfare professionals use advanced family search and engagement technology to find and engage extended family members and other caring adults for children in need. A graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, Dr. Jacobs served as an officer in the United States Army, where she honed her leadership skills and deepened her commitment to service. The military's core values of duty, integrity, and selfless service continue to influence her approach to transforming child welfare systems nationwide. Dr. Jacobs earned her PhD in Nuclear Engineering from the University of New Mexico, where her research focused on the intersection of technology and social services. _____________________ For More on Jennifer Jacobs, PhD Connect Our Kids AARP Purpose Prize  _____________________ Podcast Episodes You May Like  The Best Day of My Life So Far – Benita Cooper Changing the World One Small Act at a Time – Brad Aronson Live Life in Crescendo – Cynthia Covey Haller Passion & Purpose - Jim Ansara _____________________ Wise Quotes On Redirecting Skills & Expertise "So, I'm a physicist and a nuclear engineer, which is a natural segue, of course, to the nonprofit world. I was working in counterterrorism, as I did for most of my adult life after leaving the Army. And at that time read an article in Time magazine about foster care. This was about 13 years ago. And in reading that article, I noticed a similarity in what it turned out foster care professionals need to do to find families for the kids in their care. And what I already knew intelligence analysts do to find and track terrorists. They're both needing to find and visualize networks of people in order to influence and interact with that those networks. The difference is just that one is centering around a terrorist and one is centering around a child. And because they're similar processes, I thought I would find that they were using similar tools. Instead, what I found out was that while the national security space has multi-million dollar software with data search and management capabilities, as I knew, the foster care space was doing practically the same work with Post-it Notes and Microsoft Excel. And that didn't seem right to me. So I spent the next six years trying to understand why we fight terrorism with everything we have - and that's a good thing - but we don't fight for the futures of the nearly half million children in our foster care system." On Deciding to Pivot "The only remaining reason not to do it was really fear. And fear of the unknown, fear of doing something that was way outside my comfort level,