The Give-Back Years

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In 1997 TeamMates underwent its first expansion. Rather than using only collegians as mentors, the Osbornes began recruiting adults from the greater Lincoln community. Lincoln TeamMates now helps 300 students, and since the new wave of mentors are older and more firmly rooted in town, they can stick with their proteges longer than many Huskers could.

This summer the Osbornes announced they were taking TeamMates statewide, bringing as many as 400 more children into the program next year. Scholarships can no longer be guaranteed, however. "We have to rely on the communities to decide what level of funding they'd be willing to give," says Osborne. "On the other hand, even if a kid has a problem, we wouldn't pull out on someone."

Among TeamMates' newest mentors are the Osbornes themselves. When he stepped down as Husker coach last January, Osborne teamed up with Benjamin Warren, who will celebrate his 14th birthday the Sunday before Christmas. And Nancy Osborne, 59, has been mentoring Shamykka Divers, 11, for three months.

"No one is without redemption," said Tom Osborne in a sermon he gave at his church last year. "If you are told all your life that you don't measure up, and then if you are told you are a child of God and of inestimable worth, you can transcend environment and circumstances." Osborne led the Cornhuskers to 255 victories in his 25 years as coach. He'd love it if TeamMates produced a few champions too.

CAPTAIN PROJECT The Sage of Jersey spreads a green gospel

Carl L. Henn has learned a lot in his 75 years. He earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in business administration, management and international economic development, largely courtesy of the U.S. Navy, at Northwestern University, Harvard Business School and George Washington University. Highlights of his naval career include participation in the Berlin airlift and nuclear submarine duty under Admiral Hyman Rickover. Henn retired with the rank of captain, then went on to become a corporate planner for American Standard, a broker at Shearson Lehman Hutton and finally an oil-and-gas industry analyst. Yet it is his view that lifelong learning is "simply not enough."

"We need to engage in concurrent learning," says Henn, now living in New Brunswick, N.J., where he is devoting the winter of his life to using lessons from the military-industrial complex to help others understand life on our planet as a complex web of interrelated--and thus interdependent--systems. Making the connections, says Henn, will "change the way we make decisions," which in turn "will change the decisions we make."

Henn had his educational epiphany 10 years ago. "Reading industry journals, I was awakened, really for the first time, to the adverse impacts industry was having on our environment," he says. That insight set the course for his retirement years. He began bringing together people from industry, education and government so that they might learn about one another's systems and decision-making processes, allowing them to integrate this new knowledge into their business practices.