Osher Leadership Council and Teams Update

September 30, 2015
How We Spent Our Summer

Article by George Pangburn

By the time you read this, summer will be ending and our new Fall classes will be beginning. Hopefully you had a great time taking some of our Osher classes, traveling to new or favorite vacation spots, or spending time here in Richmond with family and friends. As Peggy noted in her article, there have been substantial changes to the UR campus and administration this summer:

Likewise, your Osher Institute at UR has been busy over the summer. To begin with, we’ve made progress on several of the strategic plan initiatives. These include: 

Increased Osher travel — both extended travel, as well as day trips in the Greater Richmond area — was an area that many of you commented about in our membership survey. We’ve formed an interest group to work with Peggy on both of those areas and you’ll shortly see some of the results of that group’s work.

We’ve reached out to the University to increase our interaction with faculty and staff. So far that has included a partnership with the SPCS Center for Culinary Arts (with summer wine classes, and more to follow) as well a request to several academic departments to have faculty consider teaching UR classes in their areas of expertise. We’ve also been providing greater volunteer support to UR and will continue to do so at the upcoming SPCS Golf Tournament in October.

We’ve re-constituted our Curriculum Team and had a meeting to help ensure that our course offerings are aligned with your interests from the Membership Survey.

In addition, Anne Huffstetler’s Marketing Team was busy over the summer recruiting new members at the Farmer’s Markets in the Richmond area, and we began a partnership with the American Revolution War Round Table – Richmond.

So, we’re busy on a lot of fronts, but we can do more. Your passion for lifelong learning and willingness to volunteer can help make it happen. If you’re interested, by all means contact one of us on the Leadership Council, or Peggy or Debra to get involved as a volunteer and help make a great program even better.