For correctional professionals, retirement marks the end of a career defined by service, sacrifice, and commitment. But retiring from the job does not mean leaving behind the correctional family—or the Foundation that has stood beside you throughout your career.
The Correctional Peace Officers Foundation allows retired corrections professionals to maintain their active membership. By continuing your membership after retirement, you remain connected to the CPOF community and help strengthen the promise at the heart of our mission: Taking Care of Our Own.
Your Membership Can Continue into Retirement
While many members initially join CPOF through payroll deduction, retirement does not have to end that relationship. Because payroll deductions generally stop with your final paycheck, you will need to arrange another method of payment to keep your membership active.
Retired members can typically continue their dues through:
- Automatic bank withdrawal
- Annual or semiannual payments
- Another payment arrangement coordinated with CPOF Membership Services
Making this transition before—or soon after—your retirement helps prevent an unintended interruption in your membership.
Protect Scholarship Eligibility for Your Family
One of the most important reasons to maintain membership into retirement is the continued opportunity for your family to participate in CPOF scholarship programs.
Retired members and their eligible dependents may continue to qualify for scholarship opportunities when the member met CPOF’s active membership requirements before retirement and maintains the membership status required by the program.
These scholarships can help spouses, children, and grandchildren pursue college, vocational education, and other eligible training. Continuing your membership is one way to protect an opportunity that may benefit your family for years to come.
Learn more about CPOF Scholarship Programs
Remain Connected to the Correctional Family
A career in corrections creates relationships that are difficult to describe to those outside the profession. Your coworkers understand the long shifts, missed holidays, difficult calls, and responsibilities carried home at the end of the day.
Retirement may change your daily routine, but it does not erase those experiences or the bonds built over a lifetime of service.
Remaining connected with CPOF allows retired members to continue receiving Foundation news, learning about programs and events, and staying engaged with a national community of correctional professionals and families.
Continue Making a Difference
Retired corrections professionals possess something invaluable: experience.
Through volunteer service, outreach, event participation, mentorship, and other opportunities, retirees can continue supporting the profession they helped shape. Their knowledge can encourage a new correctional employee, strengthen relationships within a department, help another family understand CPOF, or simply remind active personnel that they are not alone.
Retirement does not diminish the value of your service. In many ways, it creates a new opportunity to share it.
Stay Prepared and Informed
Maintaining an ongoing relationship with CPOF also helps retirees and their families remain familiar with the Foundation’s programs and application processes.
CPOF provides assistance to eligible correctional professionals and families facing qualifying catastrophic circumstances. Because each request is reviewed according to the Foundation’s current guidelines and available documentation, retired members should contact CPOF directly with questions about their individual eligibility or situation.
Staying connected makes it easier to know where to turn when your family—or another correctional family—needs information.
Before You Retire
If retirement is approaching, take a few moments to prepare:
- Contact CPOF Membership Services before your payroll deduction ends.
- Confirm your mailing address, email address, and telephone number.
- Select a new method for paying your membership dues.
- Ask how retirement may affect scholarship or assistance eligibility.
- Encourage retiring coworkers to make the same preparations.
A simple update can help preserve a connection built over the course of your career.
Your Service Continues. So Can Your Membership.
You may turn in your keys, remove the uniform, and work your final shift—but you will always be part of the correctional family.
By maintaining your CPOF membership in retirement, you remain connected to the people, purpose, and shared commitment that defined your years of service. You also help ensure that CPOF can continue standing beside correctional professionals and their families when they need us most.
Retirement begins a new chapter. CPOF is honored to remain part of it.
To update your membership status or arrange a new payment method, contact CPOF Membership Services through CPOF.org or call the Foundation at 800-800-CPOF.
Program eligibility is subject to current CPOF guidelines and individual circumstances. Members are encouraged to contact the Foundation for information specific to their membership and family.