Enhance Economic Security

• Benefits Access
• Economic Security Initiative
• Mature Workers
  • Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP)
  • Senior Environmental Employment Program (SEE)
• Home Equity
• National Center for Benefits Outreach & Enrollment

Resources

For Professionals

• Celebrate Older Americans Month by Finding Benefit Programs that Can Help You
• 5 Key Facts Must Inform the Medicare Reform Debate
• House Budget Reconciliation Sets Disturbing Precedent for Seniors Programs
• SCSEP Targeted in Workforce Investment Act Proposal
• NCOA and Bank of America Charitable Foundation Partner to Help Seniors Become Savvy Savers
• The Impact of Isolation on the Economic Security of Older Adults
• State Advocate Experiences and Engagement in Duals Integration

For Older Adults and Caregivers

• Long-Term Services & Supports: Candidate Survey
• You Gave, Now Save

For Advocates

• 5 Key Facts Must Inform the Medicare Reform Debate
• House Budget Reconciliation Sets Disturbing Precedent for Seniors Programs
• Preventing Funding Cuts for Healthy Aging Programs: What You Can Do to Help

Poverty is Personal

When the stock market crashed, Joseph McCloskey, 58, lost all his savings. He’d spent most of his life painting homes, but could no longer compete with the younger, cheaper labor entering the market.

So he did something he’d never considered—he found a bed in a Virginia homeless shelter.

Unsure of where to find work, he turned to the Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP), a job training initiative for mature workers sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor and administered by NCOA.

“You’re driftin’ farther and farther down, and you’re trying to find a job to put a stop to the downward spiral,” McCloskey says of that period. “Nobody wanted a 58-year-old painter … and finally I just hung it up, I had no idea what I was going to do.”

The program placed him in a part-time position, set him up with additional training courses, and put him on a path out of the shelter. For individuals like McCloskey—too young to collect Social Security but old enough that employers pass him over—SCSEP became a critical lifeline and opportunity for a second chance.

SCSEP’s staff found McCloskey an administrative position at the Red Cross. They also enrolled him in a Microsoft Office certification program. Now he has both updated computer skills and non-painting work listed on his résumé—and the opportunity to seek a permanent job.

NCOA's One Away campaign is gathering real stories like McCloskey's to educate individuals and policymakers about seniors' economic struggles—and to advocate for change.

want to live in a country where

older adults don't have to choose between paying for medicine or food.