Osher staff update
Greetings! Now that I have a few months under my belt as your new Osher director, I want to say thank you! Thank you for your warm welcome, encouragement, and support. I can honestly say I am having a great time, and I am honored to have this wonderful position. It’s been my pleasure to meet all of you and to work with you on Osher projects and activities. I’ll look forward to getting to know those of you whom I’ve not yet met.
By now, I trust you have taken a close look at the fall catalog of courses and have signed up for many of the offerings. I hope that you have found the redesign to be well organized and easy to follow and that you like the course topics included. I appreciate your feedback, so let me know what you think.
Even as we enter into the fall array of courses and activities, the Osher office is busy planning for the spring. As this is YOUR organization, you should always feel free to recommend courses and suggest instructors who would be good additions to our offerings.
That same thought holds true for interest groups. In my first few days in the office, Osher and SPCS staff member Linda Turner asked about forming a new group for theatre lovers. Thanks to her hard work, energy, and enthusiasm, we now have the new Theatre Lovers interest group, with more than 110 members!
This year marks our 10th year within UR’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies. This is a great milestone for our organization and a time to acknowledge the vision of Senior Associate Dean Pat Brown, the hard work of Jane Dowrick, Deb Guild, and many, many Osher members, as well as the strong support of Dean Jim Narduzzi and the entire UR community.
In an effort to ensure that our Osher Institute continues to flourish, we are developing a strategic plan, which we hope will lead us into another great 10 years. Osher members George Pangburn, Dave Frimpter, Bill Bailey, Jamie Lou Hawthorne, and Bill Bateman are serving on the strategic planning team. Accolades go to George, who worked tirelessly on developing a survey instrument. We asked for your response, and you did indeed respond! We closed the survey on September 15, with a 30% response rate. Special kudos also go to Dave, who analyzed our Osher membership data and course registrations for the past five semesters. His work has been nothing short of amazing! We look forward to bringing in a larger representative group of Osher members to review the survey responses, to connect that information with our membership and registration data, and to generate great new ideas to incorporate into Osher courses and activities.
Thank you again for the opportunity to work with you. I will look forward to helping make the next 10 years for UR’s Osher Institute as special and meaningful as the first 10.
Peggy