Who are the Boomers?

As early as 2010, one in five Californians will be 60 years of age or older. This group of active, older adults is expected to grow more than twice as fast as California’s total population, increasing to 8.5 million people by 2020.

But 60 years of age no longer means what it once did.  Over the past century, life expectancies have doubled leading many Boomers to feel younger and more capable than their chronological age might have once implied. Consequently, as Boomers enter their 50s and 60s they now have the opportunity to redefine the meaning and purpose of the decades between middle and late life. They are creating a new life stage — focused more on inner needs and self actualization than on the external needs that framed much of their earlier lives. Traditional models of retirement and senior services do not match these interests and are being replaced by new models of engagement — including encore careers, community service, and lifelong learning.

Boomers are not, however, a single monolithic cohort.  Although influenced by similar generational values (such as: personal gratification, control, a strong work ethic, no to the status quo, and optimism), they do not represent a single mindset but an eclectic and diverse array of perspectives.  Program and service responses must understand their differences while looking for their commonalities and base service responses not on age but on the various stages of midlife.

Why do Boomers matter?

The U.S. Boomer generation is significantly larger than either the generations that precede them or the ones that follow.  As life expectancies extend, Boomers generally will have 30 years of productive living added to their midlife.  If Boomers can be effectively mobilized and engaged to use these productive years giving back to their communities, they could become a social resource of unprecedented proportions. By contributing their time, skills, passion, and financial resources, they could leave a profound social legacy. Accordingly, since the late 1990s, Civic Ventures (www.civicventures.org), a national think tank and incubator of innovation on this “new life stage,” and other national organizations including AARP (www.aarp.org) and the National Council on Aging (www.respectability.org), have been tracking trends in the attitudes, motivations, and behaviors of the Boomer cohort as well as the readiness of the public, nonprofit, and private sectors to respond. Their studies have found that despite growing evidence of the diverse and common characteristics of the Boomer generation, none of the three sectors has yet to fully realize the opportunity this multi-faceted group represents nor have they built the necessary strategies and capacities to effectively serve and engage them.

Public libraries have the potential to become cornerstone institutions for Boomers and productive aging, but they too will need to develop new strategies and capacities to better serve and engage them.  Taking a lead in this area could also increase awareness of libraries as important and innovative community leaders, which in turn could help to ensure their own future.

To support library staff in rethinking and recreating their mental models about Boomers, seven Boomer Trends sections have been developed.  Each section provides background and insights into an issue of particular relevance to Boomers and a content area for libraries to leverage.