Dr. Ethel Percy Andrus
1884-1967
Founder of AARP
A friend of mine jokingly (maybe only half-jokingly) once told me about the Four Horsemen of Senior Citizenship:
- The AARP Card arrives in the mail.
- You apply for Medicare
- You receive your first Social Security payment
- Take that first required minimum distribution from your IRA or 401-K
The AARP card is the wake-up call for most of us. AARP has become a very successful and effective organization for advocating for older Americans. It has over 38 million members and the AARP magazine and the AARP Bulletin are the two most read publications in the US. Its website had 300 million visits in 2023.
But every large, successful organization was once just an idea or a passion about fulfilling an unmet or underserved need. It’s important to remember that entrepreneurship applies to non-profits and for profits. The founding of AARP is such a story.
According to the AARP website: “It all began one Saturday, when Dr. Ethel Percy Andrus received a telephone call from a shopkeeper 30 miles outside of Los Angeles. He had read in the newspaper that Dr. Andrus had been appointed to the California Retired Teachers Association’s committee on retired teachers’ welfare, and asked if she could check up on an old woman in his neighborhood who needed food, eyeglasses and teeth. He provided the woman’s address.”
Here is the rest of the story, as told later by Dr. Andrus herself. Find out How A Chicken Coop Inspired the Founding of AARP.
