Meet Carolyn Leith - by Beth Timson
Volunteering is a great excuse to talk to people and strike up a conversation. April 2016
As you’re enjoying this edition of the Spotlight and OLLI member website, be sure to send a “thanks!” to Carolyn Leith, the Spotlight online newsletter’s main support. This volunteer work is in keeping with her lifelong professional goal: helping people connect and find the information they want and need.
Carolyn is a native of Massachusetts, but she and her family moved to this area in 1984. She had been active in Newton's artists-in-the-schools program in Massachusetts; and when she found that the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City schools didn’t have such a program, she worked to get one started. That led on to work with the Orange County Arts Commission, then to volunteer work on the Chapel Hill Public Arts Commission and the Orange County Arts Commission.
It’s likely that her most unique job was as an arts administrator with Duke University Hospital's Cultural Services Program, where she worked from 1992-2002. Carolyn recalls that Duke was a founding member of a national organization linking health care with the arts; thanks to that emphasis and the drive of Carolyn and others on the Duke arts program staff, the hospital began featuring the work of local North Carolina artists in the hospital rooms, poems on hospital corridor walls, and in-house TV broadcasts of videos featuring NC topics. Dancers and musicians performed in the patient areas. She notes that the program also created a weekly literary round table to which patients and staff were equally welcome and a yearly employee art show that still continues.
After ten years with the Duke Hospital, she moved to the start-up Duke Center for Environmental Solutions and then the Film and Digital Video Program, now called Arts of the Moving Image. This program grew from the university’s literature program as a new way to connect students with the emerging media of creative communication.
When Carolyn retired from her work at Duke, a membership at OLLI was a part of the package. She comments that she had known about Duke’s program for continuing education back when it was DILR (the Duke Institute for Learning in Retirement) through doctors who had taught in it when she worked with them at the hospital.
She jumped into volunteering early in her membership in OLLI. “I just felt,” she says, “that there were communication needs.” She was thinking that perhaps a brochure would be the solution. Former editor of the OLLI Spotlight paper newsletter Phil Hopkins realized the need to go online with the information for the easiest and fastest transmittal.
Carolyn volunteered to take on the Spotlight newsletter from Hopkins, and she was delighted to partner up with volunteer Tamara Burkett. She says, “I prefer to be strong supporting member rather than a leader,” and she happily handled the editorial and technical work while Burkett “attended Board meetings and discussed policy issues."
She has worked with Spotlight for several years now, and has the submittals and deadlines in a smooth routine—but “the first few months were tough!” The Spotlight in 2010 and 2011 came out every week. She also worked with OLLI member Phil Carl on some OLLI videos in those years, posting on the web site short videos of instructors talking about their courses. “We used my little Flip cam,” she laughs, “and it was a lot of work.”
Is the volunteer job worth the work, she was asked. “Yes, it’s worth it,” she says. “And it’s a great excuse to talk to people and strike up a conversation.” That said, Carolyn is looking for other volunteers who are interested in helping OLLI members learn about each other and connect up through the Spotlight and who want to share the tasks of the Communications Committee.
As you’re enjoying this edition of the Spotlight and OLLI member website, be sure to send a “thanks!” to Carolyn Leith, the Spotlight online newsletter’s main support. This volunteer work is in keeping with her lifelong professional goal: helping people connect and find the information they want and need.
Carolyn is a native of Massachusetts, but she and her family moved to this area in 1984. She had been active in Newton's artists-in-the-schools program in Massachusetts; and when she found that the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City schools didn’t have such a program, she worked to get one started. That led on to work with the Orange County Arts Commission, then to volunteer work on the Chapel Hill Public Arts Commission and the Orange County Arts Commission.
It’s likely that her most unique job was as an arts administrator with Duke University Hospital's Cultural Services Program, where she worked from 1992-2002. Carolyn recalls that Duke was a founding member of a national organization linking health care with the arts; thanks to that emphasis and the drive of Carolyn and others on the Duke arts program staff, the hospital began featuring the work of local North Carolina artists in the hospital rooms, poems on hospital corridor walls, and in-house TV broadcasts of videos featuring NC topics. Dancers and musicians performed in the patient areas. She notes that the program also created a weekly literary round table to which patients and staff were equally welcome and a yearly employee art show that still continues.
After ten years with the Duke Hospital, she moved to the start-up Duke Center for Environmental Solutions and then the Film and Digital Video Program, now called Arts of the Moving Image. This program grew from the university’s literature program as a new way to connect students with the emerging media of creative communication.
When Carolyn retired from her work at Duke, a membership at OLLI was a part of the package. She comments that she had known about Duke’s program for continuing education back when it was DILR (the Duke Institute for Learning in Retirement) through doctors who had taught in it when she worked with them at the hospital.
She jumped into volunteering early in her membership in OLLI. “I just felt,” she says, “that there were communication needs.” She was thinking that perhaps a brochure would be the solution. Former editor of the OLLI Spotlight paper newsletter Phil Hopkins realized the need to go online with the information for the easiest and fastest transmittal.
Carolyn volunteered to take on the Spotlight newsletter from Hopkins, and she was delighted to partner up with volunteer Tamara Burkett. She says, “I prefer to be strong supporting member rather than a leader,” and she happily handled the editorial and technical work while Burkett “attended Board meetings and discussed policy issues."
She has worked with Spotlight for several years now, and has the submittals and deadlines in a smooth routine—but “the first few months were tough!” The Spotlight in 2010 and 2011 came out every week. She also worked with OLLI member Phil Carl on some OLLI videos in those years, posting on the web site short videos of instructors talking about their courses. “We used my little Flip cam,” she laughs, “and it was a lot of work.”
Is the volunteer job worth the work, she was asked. “Yes, it’s worth it,” she says. “And it’s a great excuse to talk to people and strike up a conversation.” That said, Carolyn is looking for other volunteers who are interested in helping OLLI members learn about each other and connect up through the Spotlight and who want to share the tasks of the Communications Committee.