OLLI at Duke - Member Website

Conscious Aging Overview


Wednesdays, 12:45 pm - 1:45 pm

NEW LOCATION:  Ample parking
St. Luke's Episcopal Church 
1737 Hillandale Rd.
​Durham, NC


Free, No Registration Needed
BRING YOUR LUNCH!
Our committee’s goal for the Conscious Aging lecture series is to provide members with a  wide-ranging buffet of topics to sample, encompassing health and wellness, history, politics, culture, arts, local interest, and topics of special relevance for active seniors. We aim to educate, challenge, delight, and surprise attendees.

The lectures in this series are a FREE benefit for all OLLI members (and their guests who carpool with a member), and they encompass a potpourri of topics and speakers. Some of these talks even turn into courses! 

The Conscious Aging series starts during the second week of classes and meets every Wednesday that OLLI is in session during the fall and winter. Feel free to bring your lunch,. We follow OLLI’s inclement weather guidelines. 

We welcome YOUR input! Our committee meets in the fall and spring to plan the upcoming semester, and we’re happy to welcome new volunteers. We also invite your ideas for topics and speakers you’d like us to consider. Contact us if you have an idea to share: olliconsciousaging@gmail.com.  

We hope to see you soon!
Patti Rieser, co-chair
Susan Schaffer, co-chair
​Barry Cohen, co-chair

Tony Bennett
Sara Craven
Frank O’Neal

Carol Pinkasavage
Gloria Scheiner​
Susan Spitzer 

Member Input and Session Planning

​Thanks to the members who have made suggestions for future Conscious Aging topics and speakers. We review all the weekly feedback forms and add your suggestions to our idea list, which fills several pages. Some we use, some we don’t. We take many factors into account when we plan the schedule.

Some suggestions are too specific and narrowly focused for our general audience. Others are too broad; in this case, we pass them along to the curriculum committee as a course suggestion. An example of the latter is a member request for a talk about pain with specific recommendations for treatment and specialists. There are so many different kinds of pain and specialists to treat it, it would make a better course than one-hour talk.

Some ideas are great, and we are unable to find a suitable speaker who is available during our time slot. We try to include a variety of topics each session (e.g., health, aging transitions, psychology, local interest, politics, sports). With rare exceptions, we don’t repeat topics or speakers more often than every two or three years (e.g., there was a recent request for yoga for seniors, Carol Krucoff gave a talk on this in December 2014, so that great idea is on hold for a bit).

We value your input, whether or not you see it scheduled as a talk for the next session. We do our best to create a varied and interesting slate of topics and speakers, and we appreciate your attendance and support. Watch the Spotlight and this page for the schedule. And keep those ideas coming!
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