N.C. Center for Creative Retirement to Host Biannual Conference on Lifelong Learning

Leaders of lifelong learning programs from McGill University in Montreal to Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla. will converge September 10-13, 2005 in Asheville, N.C. for a biannual conference on the progress of this growing movement that has enticed thousands of lifelong learners to reenter the classroom. Headquarters for the event will be the Reuter Center on the University of North Carolina at Asheville campus, home of the North Carolina Center for Creative Retirement (NCCCR), the conference host.

The gathering of representatives from some of the country’s 350 lifelong learning institutes (LLIs) is a Mid-Atlantic regional event, said Jacque Morgan and Dave Stewart, conference cochairs. “But participation is not geographically restricted and so this event has drawn people from further afield,” said Morgan who expects about 175 attendees.

The LLI movement had its grassroots beginnings with the 1962 establishment of the Institute for Retired Professional at the New School for Social Research (now New School University) in New York City.

“It was then and still is a radical idea,” said NCCCR Director Ron Manheimer, a nationally recognized leader in the field. “LLIs are generally self-organized by small groups of local residents working with an area’s college or university. Once an LLI is launched, its members help to administer, govern, teach in, evaluate and pay it. So here we have adult learners helping to run an educational program of their own creation,” said Manheimer.

The LLI movement expanded rapidly from the mid-1980s with programs cropping up at nationally renowned institutions like Harvard, Johns Hopkins, UCLA, and Duke University, and at regionally well-known schools such as Furman University in Greenville, S.C., N.C. State in Raleigh, and UNC Asheville.

“Lifelong learning is part of the reinvention of retirement,” said Harry R. Moody, director of academic affairs at AARP in Washington, D.C.  Moody, a national expert on aging and social policy, bioethics and late life spirituality, will speak at the September 10 daylong preconference on how the Boomer generation, in planning to work beyond the traditional retirement age, may affect the future of LLIs.

Other notable speakers include Jan Hively, former deputy mayor of St. Paul, MN and initiator of the Minnesota Vital Aging Network, the group that has promoted continued learning and service opportunities throughout that state’s rural communities, and David Brown, former UNC Asheville chancellor who set the wheels in motion to establish NCCCR in 1987.

Elderhostel, the Boston-based international travel-learning organization that maintains an umbrella organization for the nation’s LLIs through its Elderhostel Institute Network, is cosponsoring the LLI conference.

A list of speakers, their bios and topics of the conference’s many presentation is available on-line at www.unca.edu/ncccr/EIN_conference/Conference.htm.

Media Contacts:

• Dr. Ron Manheimer, N.C. Center for Creative Retirement Director, 828/232-5180
• Jill Yarnall, UNC Asheville Public Information Assistant Director, 828/251-6526