Meet retired professor Irene Buchman and retired teacher Kayla Gluck. Together, the two friends founded A Tavola (Italian for “at the table”), which brings together a diverse group of women to learn, empower, and drive positive change in their communities and beyond.

Irene and Kayla are the next people you’ll meet in Retirement in Real Life, a video series featuring real women and the choices they’ve made to live their retirement on their terms. Because retirement is different for everyone.

See their story below, and then start planning for a retirement you’ll love today.

Kayla: It started with Trump. I didn’t want to be where people were arguing anymore. I wanted to do something that brings lots of different people together.

Irene: We met in our synagogue many, many, many years ago. But we became closer, really, in more recent years, particularly when we started working on these projects.

Kayla: I was driving home and suddenly it just came to me, why don’t you make an event. So I started approaching a few friends, running it by them. Maybe what we can do is we’ll all cook together. And Irene being Irene, she said, “Why don’t we have a speaker come?”

Irene: We had heard this woman talking on immigration. She was terrific, so we invited her. It’s that combination of what we think is an important topic and sort of who do we know, or who do we know who we can ask?

Kayla: And we both agreed that we could have easily invited as many people as we wanted, women our age, white and Jewish, and we would have filled the entire roster. But we absolutely were against doing that. I think we had 12 different countries represented. The oldest person I think is 95. The young people are in their 20s.

Irene: There is a kind of magic of getting all these interesting women together. I think it’s something healing that’s taking place that gives people the strength to go out and do things and to do things beyond your comfort zone. I did some canvassing last week, which I’ve never done before in my life.

Kayla: They’re all amazing, these people. To be able to sit and talk with somebody who’s 40 years your senior … it’s just a really nice thing to do.

Irene: When you’re retired, you can just follow your nose. Something will come up and you have time to look into it. And that’s what happened in my retirement. And with Kayla, we’ve gotten ourselves involved in two really marvelous and very fulfilling projects.

I’m Irene Buchman. I’m 73 years old.

Kayla: My name is Kayla Gluck. I am 83 years old.

Both: And this is my next chapter.