Meet Sara Craven - by Beth Timson
Interviewing OLLI volunteer Sara Craven is making a visit as well to some important local programs and institutions. She and her family moved to North Carolina just in time for her to start her college career at UNC, with a major in history. She met her husband Jim in a class there, then went on to graduate school in social work. “UNC only had about 10,000 students in those days,” she recalls. Her degrees led her into work with foster care and child protective services, then children’s mental health care at the Wright School in Durham. She took a period of “time out” from work to raise her own three sons: Jamie, Joe, and Will.
But once the boys were all in school, she got back into work, this time with the newly-developing hospice movement. In the late 1970’s there were no hospices in NC and just a few she was familiar with, through her work in the Episcopal Church, in the whole country. Winston-Salem had the first hospice, Chapel Hill the second in NC (Triangle Hospice, 1979). A lot of her time was spent on fund-raising, she says, since hospice care was a long way from being certified for health insurance. Now, she notes, hospice is eligible for Medicare; but then, doctors were “still debating whether terminally ill people should be told,” and people were “embarrassed to talk about having cancer.” People weren’t comfortable yet with the concept of a “good death.”
After a time, burned out from this demanding work, she went to a career counseling session at the Bishop’s House at Duke, looking for assistance in crafting a new résumé. The continuing education staff there snapped her up as an assistant and, when the director of DILR (Duke Institute for Learning in Retirement) retired in 1987, hired her as the new head of that program. “I was at DILR for 20 years,” she says; “it was a really good job for me.”
The DILR program in those days was small: it had started with 42 students, and even when it was ten years old, it only had about 20 courses and 200 students per term. We had nothing like the data base and registration that OLLI has now, she recalls. “I kept the class registrations in a spiral notebook, even when we got up to 600 students; and the class rosters were typed and mimeographed.”
Over time, she realized that the DILR program would be better able to help other fledgling programs if it became part of a national association supported by Elderhostel. After the Osher Foundation began funding new learning-in-retirement programs, the Duke program was one of the first of the established programs to become a part of the Osher network. OLLI at Duke received an initial grant of $1 million and later a second million as a “super-OLLI.”
Today, volunteering in her own retirement, Sara serves on the OLLI Curriculum Committee as head of the Social Sciences and Culture and the Economics and Financial Planning sections. “I really like it,” she says; “it’s great when a good idea works out for a class.” She notes as well that with her long history with the program, she’s able to suggest that some ideas would make excellent “activities” for the OLLI members when they don’t work out as a class. She is also a member of the Conscious Aging committee.
How is today’s OLLI different from the original program, she was asked, and she gave that question a thoughtful moment: “We’re larger and successful, so we have to work harder to create community, but everyone now can find a niche in OLLI, from volunteering to just attending classes.” Finally, she laughs: “It’s good for you, being with people who are curious. OLLI is preventive mental health. There’s nothing more invigorating than being around people who are full of ideas.”
But once the boys were all in school, she got back into work, this time with the newly-developing hospice movement. In the late 1970’s there were no hospices in NC and just a few she was familiar with, through her work in the Episcopal Church, in the whole country. Winston-Salem had the first hospice, Chapel Hill the second in NC (Triangle Hospice, 1979). A lot of her time was spent on fund-raising, she says, since hospice care was a long way from being certified for health insurance. Now, she notes, hospice is eligible for Medicare; but then, doctors were “still debating whether terminally ill people should be told,” and people were “embarrassed to talk about having cancer.” People weren’t comfortable yet with the concept of a “good death.”
After a time, burned out from this demanding work, she went to a career counseling session at the Bishop’s House at Duke, looking for assistance in crafting a new résumé. The continuing education staff there snapped her up as an assistant and, when the director of DILR (Duke Institute for Learning in Retirement) retired in 1987, hired her as the new head of that program. “I was at DILR for 20 years,” she says; “it was a really good job for me.”
The DILR program in those days was small: it had started with 42 students, and even when it was ten years old, it only had about 20 courses and 200 students per term. We had nothing like the data base and registration that OLLI has now, she recalls. “I kept the class registrations in a spiral notebook, even when we got up to 600 students; and the class rosters were typed and mimeographed.”
Over time, she realized that the DILR program would be better able to help other fledgling programs if it became part of a national association supported by Elderhostel. After the Osher Foundation began funding new learning-in-retirement programs, the Duke program was one of the first of the established programs to become a part of the Osher network. OLLI at Duke received an initial grant of $1 million and later a second million as a “super-OLLI.”
Today, volunteering in her own retirement, Sara serves on the OLLI Curriculum Committee as head of the Social Sciences and Culture and the Economics and Financial Planning sections. “I really like it,” she says; “it’s great when a good idea works out for a class.” She notes as well that with her long history with the program, she’s able to suggest that some ideas would make excellent “activities” for the OLLI members when they don’t work out as a class. She is also a member of the Conscious Aging committee.
How is today’s OLLI different from the original program, she was asked, and she gave that question a thoughtful moment: “We’re larger and successful, so we have to work harder to create community, but everyone now can find a niche in OLLI, from volunteering to just attending classes.” Finally, she laughs: “It’s good for you, being with people who are curious. OLLI is preventive mental health. There’s nothing more invigorating than being around people who are full of ideas.”