Back in July I wrote about the finalists that had made it through the $10,000 award segment of the Purpose Prize, an award that honors older Americans working to solve social problems in creative and innovative ways.

This week, the winners were announced, five of them, each receiving $100,000.

Dr. Donald Berwick, 60, co-founded the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Cambridge, Mass., led two campaigns that are estimated to have saved more than 120,000 lives though improved practices.

Gordon Johnson, 74, set up an organization in Daytona Beach, Florida, Neighbor to Family, that works with kids removed from homes, does what it can to keep trauma to a minimum and 'professionalizes' foster parents. Its main function is to keep sibling groups together.

The program has helped more than 5,000 children in five states.

H. Eugene Jones, 91, started an arts-education group called Opening Minds Through the Arts in Tucson, Arizona, that "integrates music and the arts into elementary-school teaching as a way to boost academic achievement" that now serves 17,000 children, more than half from low-income families, in 36 public schools.

Wilma Melville, 73, founded the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation, in Ojai, California, after spending a week with her trained Labrador in searching the devastation of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

The organization has since trained 85 canine search teams, all certified by FEMA, that are provided to fire departments at no cost.

The dogs have searched for survivors following disasters including the September 11 terrorist attacks and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

And finally, Sharon Rohrback, 64, a neonatal nurse who started up the Nurses for Newborns Foundation, a network of nurses that come into homes where poverty, violence, drug use or other issues prompt the need for extra care.

I recently was compelled to comment on a blog written by a woman who works in the adoption field in which she issued a personal edict that said no one over the age of fifty should be allowed to adopt a baby ... that "such a concept should not even be fathomed".

That I resented her blatant bias and bigotry was clear, and although I was of course taken to task by another commenter who accused me of being "threatened" ... with an added,"Just a thought." -- how simpy can you get? ... it was not out of any insecurity about my ability to parent that I suggested the blogger take her faded messiah complex and shoulder chips out of any adoption-related interactions with potential parents and get over herself.

As the Purpose Prize winners prove, being older does not equal being past it, and contributions huge and tiny, grand and specific, reaching thousands or embracing just one, are not to be discounted or marginalized.

The world is a better place when people step up, and how and when that stepping up happens varies from person to person.