Tuesday, 4/2/19     //     10:00am - 10:30am     //     Room 219 

Note Taker: Haley Johnson

Presenter: Lauren Andersen

Agenda:

About the Meeting

                These are newly created meetings designed to get all of our programs together with the service departments to go over that program’s strategic goals once a year. All staff are invited to be present for this half hour meeting if they’d like to hear about what’s going on. The program lead will present on vision, program goals, strategy, and measurement.

Osher’s Strategic Vision & Goals

• This year, Osher is really dedicated to celebrating its 15^th year anniversary. The celebration started in January and will wrap up at the end of 2019.
• One of the biggest goals for Osher is to find a new space. They’ve been working on this for the past few months and have already eliminated some options. The search is ongoing.
  • Osher would like to get out of the commander’s house and get out of 540 as well (or find a way to accommodate parking).
  • They are still offering classes in the West and looking at expanding Westwards.
  • Summit Vista (in Taylorsville) soft launched in spring and they’ll really advertise it in Fall.
• Fundraising for the new space is a big priority. Even though Osher hasn’t found the space itself yet, they’re looking at starting fundraising during the U Day of Giving (5/21-5/22). This will allow Osher to furnish and decorate the space as well as procure the equipment necessary for their classes.
• Osher members are over 1,000 now and growth doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. As long as there’s demand for the product, they’ll continue to cater to that demand and ramp up as much as they can without stressing out staff and support.

Background on the Osher Institute

                The Osher Foundation that’s based out of San Francisco has only three employees – they’re responsible for funding Osher Institutes at universities  across the country (currently there are 123). They also give scholarship to universities for return students and are active in supporting the arts in the San Francisco Bay Area.

                Once there were enough Osher Institutes created across the country, the foundation realized they weren’t interested in answering day-to-day questions from programs. They were set up to give out money, not to give out information on how to run an organization. So they founded the Osher National Resource Center (NRC) in Chicago. Their director, Steve Thaxton, advises on how to run Osher Institutes including expansion, staffing models, etc. They also put on a conference once a year.

                The NRC also oversees the various Osher Institutes to an extent. When Lauren was on maternity leave, they were very adamant that we still send an Osher representative from the U as well as an Osher member to the conference. They have certain things in their mind about what should be happening with the institutes and are really wanting to see the Osher institutes grow, which partially informs our approach. That growth can be defined by us, however, so it doesn’t necessarily have to mean increasing our membership numbers.

Questions and Answers

• Question: When Osher hit 1,000 members, the Osher Foundation gave us a million dollar gift. Will that continue?
  • Answer: Unfortunately, no. We are no completely on our own as the Osher Foundation has made it clear they will not continue to give us any operating funds. Our directive is to keep fundraising.
• Question: What are the primary issues Osher is currently facing?
  • Answer: Space and parking are the biggest. Volunteers will also become a big issue. We currently have a lot of volunteers who are retired with pensions, which means they don’t have to take a second job to stay retired and have a lot of time available to volunteer. In the next 5-10 years, Lauren expects people to be working longer in their lives and thus less able to volunteer. Osher will have to take a serious look at how they use and rely on their volunteers.
• Question: What about moving away from the very standard session-type approach that Osher uses with classes?
  • Answer: We’ve thought about changing our approach to be more like Lifelong Learning. What happens right now is that we have three 6-week sessions and we offer roughly 80 classes in each of those sessions. With a new space, we’ll have classrooms to fill year-round, so we’ll be able to adopt that lifelong-type structure. There would be three catalogues a year with fall, spring, and summer. Instead of having 80 classes all start on a Monday, we would stagger it to make things more manageable. It will change the way we staff as well – we’ll have to look at our volunteer base to see if they can help be on site and help members find their classes.
• Question: Have you thought about offering online classes?
  • Answer: Yes, we dabbled with our first online class last Fall. The company we partnered with created the curriculum, so we didn’t have to invest in course creation and were able to gauge how many people were interested. There were 8 modules available to students online and we had some field trips and an in-person session to orient the students to the online model at the beginning. We had 12 people sign up for the class, which Lauren was really happy with.
• Question: How are Osher members engaging online and being served online?
  • Answer: We are trying to push Osher members to register completely online. It will take time, but that’s the goal. We’d like to cut down on the number of calls. We have also just started our own Osher Facebook page and we’re starting to see some good engagement there.
• Question: Do you see events being a large part of Osher’s future?
  • Answer: They’re definitely not going away. While we want to be more course-focused, we do see a lot of demand for special events. The Osher students who pay for memberships really value the special events that they get to have – some events are included with membership and others have a fee.
  • Side Note: Special events are currently a pain point in the registration process that we’re hoping to address with a new registration system.
• Question: How are the Osher Lunch and Learns working?
  • Answer: They are meant to be an outreach tool – anyone can come attend. They happen during prime class time, so we’ve started to think about if we really want to keep them and offer them at a different location. Our volunteers have observed that there are enough topics to put together plenty of lunch and learns. We get maybe 4 new members per lecture, so it is working pretty well.

Osher News

                There is a planned gift in place that Osher will be receiving – the agreement asks that Personal Enrichment work with the Royal Shakespeare Company to provide education for adults. We anticipate receiving around half a million dollars that will lead us to programming with the Royal Shakespeare Company. This will be an opportunity to bring Shakespeare to Utah. We recognize, however, that Utah is a smaller state, so the idea is to invite other Osher Institutes from across the country to come and participate in some of the events we’ll be hosting.