Disability-Rights Advocate Awarded $100,000 Purpose Prize

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Act II of Laurie Ahern’s life began in a Uruguayan orphanage. The facility she visited was beautiful and clean. It also kept children with autism locked in cages.

Horrified, the mental-health advocate and former journalist launched a new career in 2003 with Disability Rights International, a nonprofit that promotes human rights.

“I couldn’t walk away from what I saw,” she said. “I’ve spent the last 11 years going to institutions where people and children are abused, neglected, denied medical care, and left for a lifetime in horrible situations just because they have a disability.”

On Friday, Encore.org named Ms. Ahern its top 2015 Purpose Prize winner and awarded her $100,000 in recognition of her fight against the torture of institutionalized children. Five other Americans also received this year’s award, which honors people over age 60 who are improving the world in innovative ways.

The Purpose Prize — 10 years old this year — is designed to show that older people’s life experiences and knowledge make them a rich resource for society, not a burden. It also explores “the meaning of a longer life well-lived,” said Marci Alboher, Encore.org’s vice president for marketing and communications, a subject of increasing importance as the number of older Americans grows.

More than $5 million has been awarded to more than 500 winners and fellows since its inception. Encore.org will celebrate its decade of prizewinners at a ceremony in February.

Eunice Lin Nichols, director of the Purpose Prize, thinks the winners have inspired people to think differently about how to spend their time after they retire.

“There is this shift in people seeing the possibilities for what might be next no matter what their age is,” she said.

‘Encore’ Careers

In addition to Ms. Ahern, this year’s winners are Patricia Foley Hinnen, founder of microlending nonprofit Capital Sisters International; Laura Safer Espinoza, executive director of the farmworkers’ rights nonprofit Fair Foods Standards Council; Jamal Joseph, founder of Impact Repertory Theatre; Samuel Lupin, founder of the health-care practice Housecalls for the Homebound; and the Rev. Belle Mickelson, founder of Dancing With the Spirit, a music program for native Alaskan communities. Each winner will receive $25,000, unrestricted.

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Although recipients are selected based on work they started after they turned 50, many apply skills honed during their earlier careers.

Ms. Safer Espinoza, a former New York State judge who retired to Florida, planned to travel and run a government program part-time after leaving the bench. After volunteering to help the farmworkers who labored near her new home, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers asked her to become director of its Fair Foods Standards Council.

“They said, ‘You don’t realize it, but your entire 30-year legal career was destined for this moment,’ " Ms. Safer Espinoza said. “My destiny was sealed at that meeting.”

As director, Ms. Safer Espinoza helps ensure agricultural companies enforce fair labor standards, oversees a worker complaint hotline, and mentors lawyers who do human-rights monitoring.

“I didn’t know I would end up working the number of hours and days that I am,” she said. “Social change does not come easily, and it does not come as a part-time gig.”

Poised to Deliver

The Purpose Prize is not a “lifetime achievement” award, Ms. Alboher of Encore.org said, and judges look for nominees whose work is innovative and poised to deliver results during the next five years.

That timeline resonates with Ms. Hinnen, who is using Capital Sisters International to shake up the microlending movement. Rather than seeking donations, the nonprofit solicits investments of $1,000 for what it calls a “Sister Bond,” which provides 10 impoverished women with $100 small-business loans. Investors can recoup their money after one year, and they receive the results of the projects they helped to support. So far, all of the participants have reinvested their money in more Sister Bond projects.

Establishing the model required a lot of legwork because of strict securities regulations, Ms. Hinnen said. Although the nonprofit has clearance to sell bonds in 25 states, it has investors only in Colorado. Ms. Hinnen plans to expand the nonprofit’s reach by giving her prize money to Capital Sisters and raising a matching amount from donors and foundations.

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The Sister Bond model is “definitely a way foundations can leverage more impact than they ever could before,” she said. “We feel there’s finally this tipping point where a lot of foundations are getting it, wealthy people are getting it, social responsibly investors are getting it.”

Refusing to Look Away

The prizewinners’ accomplishments are undeniably exceptional. But Ms. Ahern, the journalist-turned-child-rights-advocate, believes ordinary people are capable of extraordinary work. She never graduated from college, she explained. And she spent her whole life in Massachusetts.

But since joining Disability Rights International, she’s made dozens of trips to orphanages worldwide. She’s met with the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, who agreed to hold governments accountable for mistreating people with disabilities. She’s witnessed terrible cruelty and refused to look away.

Says Ms. Ahern: “If I can do it, I think anybody can do it.”