Podcast: Lifelong Learning at NC State, With Eliza Kiser

Theme Music (00:01):

Please listen carefully.

Taylor Pardue (00:08):

Welcome to the NC State Philanthropy Podcast, telling the world how we Think and Do through the support of our friends, alumni and more. I’m your host, Taylor Pardue.

(00:18):

On this episode, we’re joined by Eliza Kiser, director of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at NC State, to talk about its important work with the Wolfpack community.

(00:30):

Thanks so much for joining us today, Eliza. To kick things off, just tell listeners a little bit about yourself and what first brought you to NC State.

Eliza Kiser (00:51):

Well, first off, thank you for having me, Taylor. I’m really happy to be here today.

(00:54):

I always introduce myself by sharing my core personal values. So, those are curiosity, creativity, and helpfulness. So, as such, I’ve always been drawn to careers that are in the community informal education space, and so, OLLI was actually the perfect next opportunity for me. I’ve been here for two and a half years. I came here from City of Raleigh. I worked as the director of Pullen Arts Center for 13 years prior to coming to NC State and just really loved kind of creating a community space where people could explore topics that they were curious about in a really relaxed setting and really get a chance to discover what they were capable of.

(01:46):

And so, in 2017, through Pullen, I had an opportunity to apply for some seed-grant funding through the National Guild for Community Arts Education and Lifetime Arts to explore the space of creative aging. And at that point in time, really, [I] got excited about developing programs that were specifically for people who were 50 and older and got my feet wet with that and then happened to find OLLI, which is what I do now.

Taylor Pardue (02:17):

Your background really does sound like the perfect fit of progression to your current role. If listeners don’t already know a little bit about OLLI, talk about its primary role and then, also, just how it fits into NC State’s land-grant mission as well.

Eliza Kiser (02:30):

Sure. Yeah. So, OLLI stands for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, and we offer non-credit, short courses, study trips, lectures and special events for adults who are 50 and older. We are a membership-based organization, so people will join us for a year at a time, kind of following the traditional academic year, and during that time, they can be as involved or not involved as they want to be. We have those opportunities I just mentioned — especially, classroom learning is really popular, and we also have opportunities for people to volunteer together, both out in the community and within our organization.

(03:09):

We really prioritize volunteer leadership and making sure that our program reflects the interest of our members. We try to make space for everybody’s voices to be heard and to help be reflected in the program. So, specifically, I guess how that speaks to the land-grant mission is we’re serving a very non-traditional audience. So, our members, some of them, many of them don’t have any prior affiliation with NC State. So, I think the last member survey that we sent out, only about 20% had any previous relationship with NC State. So, we’re bringing folks to campus who don’t know the university.

Taylor Pardue (03:52):

That’s why I bring up the land-grant mission. I love OLLI’s mission for not only its direct benefits, but I love how it really brings in people to the university who may not have already been affiliated with us and really just promotes lifelong learning — like it has in the name — to share the benefits of everything that we do here on campus and to really bring people together like that. I really love that ethos of the program.

Eliza Kiser (04:13):

Yeah. I do, too. I think it’s something that really resonated with me whenever I came here.

Taylor Pardue (04:17):

So, I believe that OLLI actually offers more than 200 courses, and they go across seven thematic different areas, but talk a little bit about the courses. I mean, that’s a huge range of offerings.

Eliza Kiser (04:29):

So, I think the most exciting thing to know about our courses is — well, there are two things, really. One is that, each semester, we strive to have about 80% of our programs be brand new. So, we’re really starting from scratch every semester. We’re not repeating things or, for the majority of our programs, they’re not repeats. Really, what we’re trying to do is — our program development committee, we have about 35 volunteers right now who help us generate ideas for programs and develop them into actual courses. So, throughout the year, we collect ideas from our members whenever they complete surveys at the end of courses, whenever they fill out our member surveys, whenever they just randomly want to email our staff. We collect ideas throughout the year, we turn those over to our program development committee. They take those ideas and then their own ideas, and they really run with them and try to figure out, “OK, well, how could we make this idea into an actual program?”

(05:37):

So, they get together and work to figure out, “OK, well, these ideas fit with an existing instructor who we’ve worked with before. So, let’s approach this instructor about a new idea.” Or, “We don’t have any instructors who meet this idea, so where are we going to find somebody who can teach this for us?” And sometimes [they] come to the conclusion, “Well, maybe we should just teach this ourselves.” And so, we have our program development committee members offering to jump in and kind of tag team teaching some of the courses. So, it’s really exciting to see that community building and to see the collaborative process that they go through to develop our ideas.

(06:19):

We offer classes in fall semester, spring semester and summer semesters. Most of them are in fall and spring. So, this year I think we’re actually tracking well over 200 because we did about a hundred for the fall. We’ve got over a hundred for the spring, and we’re just pulling together the final details to release our summer catalog. There’s a lot of variety there. So, you could go one day at OLLI and take a class on astrophysics, and the next day you could be studying the French Revolution, and then the next day you could be studying some psychology behind your relationship with your grandchildren. So, we have a wide range.

Taylor Pardue (06:58):

So, you’ve mentioned the different semesters that these courses are involved in. What does a typical semester look like for a member who’s taking a class or classes?

Eliza Kiser (07:07):

For members to get the most out of the program, we hope that they’re involved with us in a lot of different ways, but of course, life happens, so anybody can be involved to the degree they want to. But I think kind of the perfect semester from what I’ve heard from other members really includes kind of a combination of classroom learning to explore your curiosity; maybe taking a study trip or two, which are like adult half-day and full-day field trips around the local area so that you not only get to know the area more but also kind of get a behind-the-scenes look at something in the general vicinity and you get to a chance to meet folks in the program in a more informal way. I think people also enjoy participating in our special-interest groups. Some of those are, we’ve got an OLLI book club, we have several writers groups.

(08:00):

We have an epicurean group that enjoys local restaurants together. We’ve got the trailblazers who are hiking around greenway trails in the local area. All sorts of opportunities for people to partake, and then also opportunities for people to contribute. So, like I said before, it’s really important to us that our program reflects the interest of our members. The members who are getting the most out of the program, really and truly, they’re volunteering and showing up for us, whether they’re bringing gifts and talents that are related to kind of hospitality and making the classroom environment more warm and welcoming or whether they are maybe serving on our program development committee and coming up with ideas for different classes we could offer next semester.

Taylor Pardue (08:45):

Even offering 200-plus courses, if that was a static catalog of courses, that’s incredible right there every semester, but to reinvent that course load basically — more than 80% reinvented, every time — I mean, that is an incredible amount of work. So, kudos on you and your team, but it also helps that lifelong learning aspect because there’s always, potentially, a new course for you to take that could really pique your interest.

Eliza Kiser (09:09):

Yeah, while a person might join OLLI, and they join by at the academic year, really, at the end of the day, we hope that our members are with us for 10, 15, 20 years and are learning something new every single semester. We have many members at this point who’ve been with us seven years, 10 years, 15 years. We’ve even got a couple who have been with us since the early ’90s. So, it’s exciting to know that we are constantly putting out content that’s still going to be new and inspiring for those very long-time members.

(09:46):

And then, I think the other thing I’d love to go back and talk a little bit more about is the work that our staff does. So, I feel really fortunate to not only work with a great group of volunteers, but also with a really wonderful team and especially Kim Little, our assistant director. She really is the person who is air traffic control for all these programs. She’s figuring out how to make the magic happen; how to really work with our program development committee and figure out how to take all these ideas and actually get them into a calendar. So, she does amazing work, and then Lindsey Hale, our special programs coordinator, she also comes up with really great ideas for study trips. It’s really fun to work with such a talented and creative team.

Taylor Pardue (10:40):

How does someone go about becoming part of OLLI? I know you mentioned earlier about 50 and over. That’s obviously one criteria.

Eliza Kiser (10:48):

That really is the only criteria. So, they can either visit our website to register, or they can just call our office, and we’re happy to sign folks up for the membership, and at that point, you’ll start getting our weekly emails and figure out all the different ways you can get involved.

Taylor Pardue (11:03):

Is there a limit, or is there a minimum or a maximum of number of courses that they can take per semester?

Eliza Kiser (11:09):

Absolutely not. So, as long as they can fit it on their calendars, they can take it.

Taylor Pardue (11:16):

That really is, it just sounds like such a great blend of courses offered, but also just a way to really fit people’s lives where they’re at and really continue that lifelong learning and making it feasible and easy and just enjoyable for them to fit it into their overall lives.

Eliza Kiser (11:32):

Just staying intellectually curious and staying socially engaged. It’s so important.

Taylor Pardue (11:38):

So, we’ve talked about being a member of OLLI, but OLLI is actually a member of a larger … suite of institutes across the nation. Talk a little bit about that and how OLLI got started in general and then here at NC State in particular.

Eliza Kiser (11:50):

Sure. So, OLLI started in 1991 as Encore and same principles apply today as did in 1991, but in 2014 we became part of the Osher Network. So, basically, at that point in time, we received an endowment from the Bernard Osher Foundation, which is a foundation that was started in 1977 by Bernard and Barbara Osher, and they opted to fund a variety of priorities that they had. Luckily for us, one of those was enabling curiosity in older adults, and so, they provided endowments to 120 organizations like ours at universities and colleges across the country that were offering this non-credit programming to adults 50 and older. Their endowments really kind of put some sustainability and stability in place for all of our organizations. So, their gift really was to kind of stabilize these opportunities and make sure that they’d persist regardless of what was happening in the country so that adults would have these great opportunities to continue learning in life’s second half.

(13:07):

In addition to the 120-plus OLLIs that the Oshers endowed across the country, they also endowed the National Resource Center. So, the Osher National Resource Center provides a key link between all of the OLLIs. They frequently say, “To know one OLLI is to know one OLLI,” and they say that because we all existed before the Osher Foundation endowed us, and so, we all are a little bit different. We reflect the flavor of our communities, we reflect the priorities of our memberships and we reflect different things about our specific universities, but having that centralized national resource center, it really allows us all to benefit from one organization that’s providing technical support, one organization that’s providing professional development, one organization that’s really linking all of us so that we can, whenever we run into problems, we can reach out to them for help. Whenever we have great ideas, we can reach out to them to figure out which other OLLI we need to get connected with.

(14:06):

I don’t know if you knew this or not, but there are actually four OLLIs in North Carolina. We’re all incredibly different from one another but really authentic in serving the communities that we’re part of. OLLI at UNC Asheville, OLLI at UNC Wilmington, and then OLLI at Duke are the other OLLIs in North Carolina.

Taylor Pardue (14:27):

I know a lot of times people hear “endowment” and they think, “Oh, it’s funded forever now.” Talk a little bit about where does, today, the average donor to NC State, where can they come in and kind of go alongside this endowment and really help take the program to another level?

Eliza Kiser (14:43):

Well, I’m really glad that you asked that question, Taylor. So, like you said, the endowment, it doesn’t fund our program forever. It provides stability, but OLLI at NC State is a receipts-based program, and so, our goal really is to capture most of the revenue that we need to operate through memberships and classes, and we really prioritize keeping those costs low for our members because we want as many people as possible to be able to participate. In fact, kind of a fun fact is, I was going back through our records. I went back to 2011, and since 2011, we have not increased our membership cost at all, and we’ve only increased the cost of our courses by $5 one time in 2017. So, really and truly, it’s not the Osher Foundation that’s responsible for that; it’s our members that are responsible for that. A big part of making OLLI at NC State possible is the average member donating $10, donating $25, donating a hundred dollars each year. Those donations that we get in, and about 20% of our members donate every year, those allow us to offer financial assistance to people who might not otherwise be able to participate. Those cover our cost for classroom rental and tech support, and they really allow us as an organization to keep those fees low, which to me is really amazing.

Taylor Pardue (16:16):

Yeah, I would agree, and I love how, talking about accessibility for lifelong learners, depending on where they’re at in that 50-plus age range, fixed incomes definitely come into play and things like that. The fact that you’ve been able to keep costs low in general is great for all of the members, but really being able to help those members, in particular.

Eliza Kiser (16:36):

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, because we’re all lucky whenever we get to go out and explore interests, and sometimes life happens, and whenever you can have another member making a donation to allow you to continue to participate regardless of what you’ve got going on in life, it means a lot.

Taylor Pardue (16:54):

Absolutely. So, as of this recording, we’re a few weeks away from NC State’s 2025 Day of Giving, which is obviously a huge philanthropic event for the university as a whole. What are some ways that listeners can potentially help OLLI through Day of Giving, particularly?

Eliza Kiser (17:09):

OLLI has a lot of fun with Day of Giving. So, I think first and foremost, we actively want to empower folks to participate in the way that’s most comfortable for them before Day of Giving. There’s that VIP window that starts about two weeks ahead of time, where if someone wanted to, and this is particularly applicable among our audience, if someone wanted to, for example, make a donation from their IRA, that’s the period of time where we can help facilitate those sorts of donations counting toward Day of Giving. And so, I know that that’s a popular option among our audience. In terms of actual Day of Giving, we think that OLLI is the best group to participate in Day of Giving because, right now, we’ve got just about 1,500 members. And so, really, if you think about it, if every one of those 1,500 members donated $10, we’ve got a lot of power in that.

(18:08):

And so, it’s really exciting for our members to compete in challenges together each year. I try to make sure that I send them information on the two or three challenges that I think that we’re going to be most competitive in, and then just try to build up the excitement. So, it happens to be a day that we also have classes in our classrooms. So, it’s fun for our members to see how we’re doing on the leaderboards. We love competing in the university challenges, we love competing with other folks who are on the university priorities leaderboard and we love getting those bonus funds. So, I know our members really do a lot to try to help us win those challenges.

Taylor Pardue (18:50):

That does sound like fun, that it falls — I’m glad that it does fall on a day that you’re having courses already and can really have that sense of camaraderie in the room together.

Eliza Kiser (18:58):

Absolutely.

Taylor Pardue (19:00):

We’ll be sure to include in the show notes links that listeners can go back to and be part of that on Day of Giving and, like you said, as well, in that two-week window beforehand. What are some of, maybe, your favorite stories and memories that have come out of your time with OLLI so far?

Eliza Kiser (19:14):

Gosh. Honestly, it’s the remarkable people that I get to meet. Our members are really special for me. I know people don’t have the benefit of seeing me, but I’m in my 40s and so, retirement is a ways away for me, but I feel like, every day, I get to learn a new lesson about perspective to have on life from our members. I get to see examples of how I want to volunteer in the community whenever I retire. I get to see examples of the type of learner I want to be when I retire. I get to see examples of the type of mentor I want to be whenever I retire, because I feel like each one of our members, they contribute something unique and special — like some gem that they’ve picked up along the way, some skill that they’ve just become really fantastic at during the course of their lives — and I feel so lucky to have this enormous group of 1,500 people who I’m getting to learn all of their best life secrets from. I feel like they help me be a better person every day. They help me get to discover purpose every day and to be grateful for the great social network around me.

Taylor Pardue (20:26):

I love that. It brings up a unique perspective of, 50-plus — it’s not necessarily after retirement. It really does facilitate lifelong learning, not just, “I’ll pick this up again when I have time.”

Eliza Kiser (20:39):

Right.

Taylor Pardue (20:39):

It goes ahead and gets you in that network of people, and you can be reaping the rewards of hearing some of their life lessons along the way.

Eliza Kiser (20:46):

Yeah.

Taylor Pardue (20:46):

So that’s incredible.

Eliza Kiser (20:46):

Yeah.

Taylor Pardue (20:47):

A fringe benefit of being a member.

Eliza Kiser (20:49):

It absolutely is. So, we just have so many fantastic folks as part of our program.

Taylor Pardue (20:56):

What are some things that are coming up for OLLI that maybe listeners would like to be part of or would like to learn more about?

Eliza Kiser (21:02):

Yeah. Well, so, first off, we’re really excited that we are finally, post-pandemic, getting to resume international travel. That was a big part of our program prior to the pandemic, and so, April, we are going to Sicily and southern Italy, and we are really excited to be doing that. We decided to make our first trek internationally be in conjunction with NC State’s WolfTreks program. So, we’ve shared a trip with them, but I think, thanks to their flexibility and their willingness to partner with us, we now know that we have enough of an audience within our membership that we can go on our own. And so, we’re really excited to be offering international travel again. That trip’s already sold out, but, if listeners want more, we’ve got a study trips subpage on our website, and we’d love for them to check it out and learn a little bit more that way.

Taylor Pardue (21:57):

Any future trips that you’ve already started thinking about now that this is back as a possibility?

Eliza Kiser (22:02):

We haven’t announced it yet, but we do already have something in the works for 2026.

Taylor Pardue (22:06):

Sounds great. So, listeners, definitely stand by and be on the lookout for an announcement about that.

Eliza Kiser (22:11):

Yes.

Taylor Pardue (22:12):

Thanks so much for sharing all this, Eliza, and just for coming out today. As of this recording, it is one of those really cold winter Raleigh days, so really appreciate your time and just sharing more about this organization. I really love the mission behind it and how it really speaks to that Wolfpack mentality, I feel like, of we have people who are not necessarily directly affiliated with the university, but really, everybody in the Triad and then in North Carolina and across the world can share in the benefits of our campus and the work we do here. And just thank you so much for your role in that.

Eliza Kiser (22:43):

Well, Taylor, thank you so much for having me today. I really enjoyed the opportunity and really enjoyed the conversation. So, thanks so much.

Taylor Pardue (22:55):

To learn more about OLLI and how you can be part of its efforts, please visit go.ncsu.edu/OLLIpodcast. If you’d like to hear even more stories of Wolfpack success, please subscribe to the NC State Philanthropy Podcast today via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher or Podbean. Please leave a comment and rating as well to let us know how we’re doing. Thanks for listening, and as always, go Pack.