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OLLI at UNC Asheville’s mission is to promote opportunities to thrive in life’s second half through programs in lifelong learning, leadership, community service, and research. Join us to discover wonderful, new aspects of yourself and the environment that surrounds you! Mission Members get to join a new community by making friends with people who share curiosity and enthusiasm for trying new things. OLLI continues to grow by taking the accumulated experience and knowledge of the past and making it newly relevant to the changing environment and conditions of life. Service: We encourage our members to grow through service to OLLI, UNC Asheville, and the community.Continuous Improvement: We seek continuous improvement in our communications, organization, inclusion, operations, programming, and facilities.
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Collaboration: We collaborate both within and outside OLLI to offer programs that benefit our members and the community.Innovation: We strive to be at the leading edge and model best practices nationally in learning, life transitions, and civic engagement programs for older adults.Lifelong Learning: We are an enthusiastic group of learners and teachers.Sense of Community: We are a community of adults who share fellowship in an atmosphere that is respectful, stimulating, creative, fulfilling, and fun.Our values express how we expect to travel where we want to go: OLLI’s uniqueness has earned it frequent mention in publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, SmartMoney, Business Week, Kiplinger’s, and The Christian Science Monitor, TV’s CBS Sunday Morning, and websites such as CNN.com, AOL.com and many others. We benefit from a diversity of life experiences and points of view and value the opportunity to learn from one another both inside and outside our classes. Many of our participants have relocated to the area, but we encourage those who have lived and worked in Western North Carolina throughout their lives to seek a creative retirement at OLLI. Most of our members are over 55, but we encourage attendance by any adult who wishes to be part of our community of learners. OLLI membership is open to anyone who wishes to experience the wide range of courses and activities we offer. Approximately 450 members volunteer each year to do everything from teach, serve on committees, run research projects, and mentor undergraduates. More than two-thirds of our budget is derived from endowment income, member contributions and fees, with the rest from state funding. Members and staff collaborate to create all programs. OLLI is housed in our own building, the Reuter Center, on the UNC Asheville campus. OLLI at UNC Asheville (OLLI) embraces a comprehensive array of programs in the arts and humanities, the natural world, civic engagement, wellness, life transition and retirement relocation planning. Our goal is to enable our members to thrive in life’s second half. We opened our doors in 1988 as a department of the University of North Carolina at Asheville. The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UNC Asheville (formerly the North Carolina Center for Creative Retirement) is an award-winning, internationally-acclaimed learning community dedicated to promoting lifelong learning, leadership, community service, and research. Institutional Research + Effectiveness Planning.