The Retiree's Guide to Volunteering While Traveling: A Practical Guide to Meaningful Travel After Retirement

MARISA GONZALEZ has spent the past eighteen years helping retirees reimagine what life after work can look like. A former international relief coordinator with the Red Cross, she spent two decades managing disaster response programs across Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia before retiring from full-time humanitarian work in 2008.

Rather than settling into a quiet retirement, Gonzalez used her first year of freedom to test a hypothesis: that retirees with professional experience could make a meaningful difference in communities around the world while enriching their own lives in the process. She spent that year volunteering at an orphanage in Peru, teaching English at a community center in Vietnam, and working on sustainable agriculture projects in Ghana. The experiment worked better than she expected, and it launched a second career.

Since 2009, Gonzalez has designed and led volunteer travel programs for retirees through her consulting firm, Third Act Travel. She has personally placed over 1,200 volunteers aged 55 to 82 in meaningful roles across forty three countries. Her writing on retirement volunteering has appeared in AARP Magazine, International Living, and Transitions Abroad. She speaks regularly at retirement planning conferences and leads training workshops for organizations seeking to build better volunteer programs for older adults.

Gonzalez holds a master's degree in International Development from American University and is certified in Volunteer Management through the Council for Certification in Volunteer Administration. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband Miguel, and spends roughly five months each year traveling to volunteer sites around the world. The Retiree's Guide to Volunteering While Traveling is her first book.