Our Founder’s Story

Carol Lilly is the founder, concept originator, and original planner of the Boomers Collaborative concept. She has a BA in Homebuilding, Residential Design with a Minor in Art. After essentially a 25-year hiatus from career pursuits to care for family until the death of her elderly mother in 2010, she needed a plan for her next chapter in life. 

Believing she might succeed as a technical writer in her 60s and 70s, she went back to school in 2011-12 to get an MA in Technical Communication. Sadly, she graduated with her master’s degree just when most of the technical writing jobs went to India. This is when she began to conceptualize the Boomers Collaborative model for retirement—she needed a retirement survival solution to make up for her inability to secure a permanent full-time job and believed it might be of appeal to other seniors she was meeting in local job and Baby Boomer social clubs. Many began to join her in MeetUps.

In addition to designing and preparing residential plan sets as a residential designer, she has also built homes as a residential construction manager for several builders and as an independent infill housing redevelopment contractor in several Texas jurisdictions. In the role of urban planner with the City of Houston in the mid-1980s, she participated in the development of neighborhood plans, plat review, and residential program development and administration. She also served as Departmental liaison to the Houston Housing Finance Corporation. 

As an artist, she has designed a diverse array of products from a large stained-glass window for a church to dance costumes and children’s clothing. She also designed a household product for which she held a design patent. And she has additional graduate-level education in Public Administration, Urban Planning, and Business Administration in Entrepreneurship. 

Her professional expertise, education, and life experience gave me the confidence to strike out on my own and begin this journey of trying to bring along a new model for a better retirement for many who would otherwise become impoverished, more isolated, and alone. And the encouragement she has received from so many along the way have helped her persevere.