Civic Ventures announced winners of the 2011 Purpose Prizes today, awarding $100,000 each to five social entrepreneurs over 60 who founded projects to aid orphans, refugees, impoverished families, the unemployed and the environment.

"This year's Purpose Prize winners saw systemic problems -- like institutional care for orphans and global warming -- and used their experience to come up with big, systemic solutions," says Alexandra Céspedes Kent, who directs the Purpose Prize program. "Like so many other encore entrepreneurs, they want first and foremost to make a difference."

It's tempting to compare Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who died of pancreatic cancer at 56, to various legendary historical figures. The most obvious choice is Thomas Edison, whose inventions similarly changed the world, even though Jobs' real talent wasn't creating technological innovations but figuring out how to utilize them.

It's inevitable that he'll be compared to Henry Ford since Jobs shared his fearlessness about taking big risks and tenacious focus on keeping control of what he created. And it's as easy as double-clicking an icon to call Jobs, the guy who made black turtlenecks and white computers irresistibly cool, the most talented marketer since the legendary H.J. Heinz, who put a ketchup bottle on every American table.

The 2011 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation awards -- popularly known as the "genius" awards -- were announced Tuesday, and the 22 recipients of the $500,000 no-strings stipend include three people over the age of 50, and nine who are between 40 and 49.

The 50-and-over group includes artist, restoration expert and scholar Ubaldo Vitali,67, whom Smithsonian magazine has called the "greatest living silversmith in the U.S."; Marie-Therese Connolly, 54, an attorney who works to protect the elderly; and U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Kay Ryan, 65.

Here's a look at the three:

Retirement communities are an American tradition that dates back at least to 1922, when the Loyal Order of Moose opened Florida's Moosehaven, aka "the City of Contentment," which in its initial form bore less resemblance to Leisure World than it did to an Israeli kibbutz. Fraternal retirees and their spouses helped subsidize their upkeep by working on the community's dairy farm. Even if milking cows isn't your thing, you have to admit that Moosehaven's founders were gerontological visionaries. They imagined older people not as bored couch potatoes but as vigorous and energetic folks who enjoyed the sense of accomplishment and reveled in physical activity as a way to stay youthful.

I was reminded of Moosehaven when I read recently about BOOM, a proposed California retirement community near Palm Springs that is scheduled to break ground in 2012, and which recently has been getting a lot of attention in architecture publications and at the Huffington Post and the Los Angeles Times. The project was spawned when a client showed a 40-acre site to Matthias Hollwich, the co-founder of New York-based architectural firm HWKN, who's been investigating how architectural design could be used to optimize older people's lives. Originally, BOOM was envisioned as a magnet for urbane, design-conscious gay and lesbian retirees, but along the way, the concept has expanded to appeal to anybody who craves the chance to get away from polyhedrons of any sort whenever possible.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation just named the 2010 MacArthur Fellows, who will each receive $500,000 in "no strings" support over the next five years. The awards generally go to people who are creative enough to look for game-changing scientific or social solutions to the world's problems, or to push the envelope of artistic expression.

This year's list of 23 winners says a lot about the foundation's faith in the creative potential of midlife, midcareer people in their 40s and older. The average age of the recipients is 43, and five of them are 50 or older.

In 1960, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy's campaign proposals included one particularly novel idea. He wanted to recruit an army of volunteers who would counter the threat of international communism not with guns, but by working in impoverished and developing countries to improve the lives of people there. In a Nov. 2, 1960 speech in San Francisco, Kennedy described his vision for what he called a "peace corps."

"We cannot discontinue training our young men as soldiers of war," Kennedy told the audience, according to a New York Times account. "But we also need them as ambassadors of peace. This would be a volunteer corps--and volunteers would be sought among talented young women as well--and from every race and walk of life."

The problem with poetry is that most of us don't really know what it is anymore. In the early 1970s, some rock music critic convinced us that song lyrics were every bit as poetic as Homer, Blake, Yeats, Rimbaud and Gwendolyn Brooks. That idea caught on to the point that we came to assume a poem had four-line stanzas with a neat rhyme at the end of each, a cadence that fit conveniently to a backbeat, and that it ought to be about youthful romance or roaring down the highway with carefree exuberance.

And once we got used to regarding rock stars as the bards of our age, we paid less attention to actual poets--the rumpled, unglamorous iconoclasts who dared to twist and stretch the language into an asymmetrical, rough-edged disquieting tangle that might compel us to look at the world in a different way.  They were disorderly agitators, rushing the ramparts of our preconceptions and rationalizations and making trouble. Who wanted to deal with that? It was too much work. Baby, we were born to run.

For basketball junkies who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, it was deeply unsettling to hear that former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden, 99, was hospitalized and gravely ill. His death Friday night marks the passing of a sports legend.

The "Wizard of Westwood," whose teams won an astonishing 10 national championships in a 12-year-period, has been a marvel of longevity. Most of us remember him as the coach that our own favorite college teams could almost never beat. He was the mentor of two of the most dominant centers of all time, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then known as Lew Alcindor) and Bill Walton, in addition to scores of other great players who went on to pro stardom, from Gail Goodrich to Sidney Wicks.

Like most male boomers my age, I can remember back to a time when a comic book cost 12 cents instead of $3, a time before the adventures of impossibly muscular heroes in tights and masks were subjected to literary deconstructionism worthy of Jacques Derrida. (If you've ever been amused by The Simpsons character Comic Book Guy, you know what I'm talking about.) Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we all spent hours hanging out at the magazine rack at G.C. Murphy's, hoping that the clerk wouldn't chase us out the door before we'd finished thumbing through the latest issue of The Fantastic Four or Justice League of America.

Nerdy nonconformist that I was, I was particularly devoted to the obscure, long-ago-defunct Tower Comics' T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, an intrepid band of United Nations employees who secretly battled a race of super-powered subterranean humanoids commanded by the evil Overlord, who were bent on the total destruction of human civilization. For a child of the Cuban Missile Crisis who still had nightmares about mushroom clouds, it was comforting to imagine that a few brave heroes could form a bulwark against the unthinkable. Beyond that, my favorite among the agents was NoMan, a frail, ailing scientist who'd transferred his mind into a butt-kicking android body, and could shift his consciousness wirelessly among several duplicate bodies at will. I used to fantasize about how cool it would be to pull that body-transfer trick in the middle of boring fifth-grade math class, and shift into a duplicate of myself at the candy store a few streets away.

Kim Masoner likes to take long walks on the beach outside her Southern California home and got in the habit of picking up trash along the way.

She also started carrying trash bags to share with people she and her husband, Steve, met on the sand.