E-News August 2018

Click here to check out the new Fall Classes for 2018. Some of the classes will fill up fast, so sign up early and don’t wait until the last minute!

Annual Meeting

Thursday, September 27th, 11:45 – 12:45 p.m.
Hutchinson Center, Room 138
(You can bring your lunch with you!)

AGENDA

• Call to Order
• Greetings from the Hutchinson Center
• Remarks by the President
• Approval of the 2017 Year End Financial Report
• Presentation of Committee Annual Reports & Introduction of Committee Chairs
• Elections to the Board of Trustees
• By-law amendments to Articles V (Board of Trustees) and VII (Standing Committees)
• General discussion as time allows
• Adjournment

For complete information and all relevant documents, click here to go to our website.

Dear Senior College Members,

​The Fall session of Senior College is all ready to go. A full schedule of classes will be announced and available for registration by the time you receive this eNews. Also, preparations for the September 27 Annual Meeting are nearly complete. A difference this year will be that the annual meeting will be held in Room 138 (the largest meeting room) from 11:45 to 12:45 and will be a brown-bag format. While still confined to the time between morning and afternoon sessions, this will ease up on the pressure to eat hurriedly and allow a few more minutes for conducting our business. Senior College is a non-profit membership organization, with us as members completely responsible for its program, governance, and finances. The Annual Meeting is where we set the course for the upcoming year.

​Above is the agenda, including a link to the full materials on the Senior College website. Those not having internet access will be able to request paper copies from the office. There are two items I want especially to bring to your attention. The first is a series of by-law amendments. The Board of Trustees did a through review this year and found a number of places where updates were required. In the Annual Meeting materials you will find the changes, an explanation for each, and the revised language. Please review them before the Annual Meeting since there will not be time for lengthy discussion. None involve fundamental changes in Senior College but are intended to better reflect current realities.

​The second item is the Nominating Committee report and slate of candidates for positions on the Board. By now, we have pretty much gotten used to differing numbers of slots and different lengths of terms at these elections. It was not supposed to be that way! Senior College was designed to have three classes of five trustees, all with three year terms. This year’s slate with eight trustees with varying terms is designed as a one-time correction to get us back on track. (One of the by-law changes adds language to make this clearer.)

​Of course, I recommend carefully reading all the reports as a way of celebrating all that Senior College has accomplished.

​On another topic, I need to correct something I said a year ago. The August 2017 eNews mentioned that the seventeen Maine senior colleges followed from the work of the Bernard Osher Foundation’s establishment of the Osher Life-Long Learning Institute at Southern Maine University in 2000. Subsequently, I have learned that the chain of causation was just the reverse! The Osher Foundation actually picked up on the senior college idea from Maine’s already established Senior Colleges at Southern Maine University and Bar Harbor. It has since taken the senior college idea national by establishing OLLI’s in nearly a hundred locations around the country.

​Looking forward to seeing you when classes start!

Mary F. Gray
April 9, 1932 – July 3, 2018

Carol Bisbee
December 18, 1925 – July 26, 2018