Community Conversations with OLLI at MSU Friday Forum
By Marjorie Smith, OLLI MSU member volunteer
At noon on the second Friday of each month in the academic year, one hundred or more people in Montana’s Gallatin Valley connect via Zoom to a discussion of a timely local or regional issue. Friday Forums are a regular presentation of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Montana State University, and open to any interested person who registers, whether or not they are OLLI members or within OLLI’s targeted 50 and better age group. Sometimes it seems to me that the most revealing questions or comments come from younger people in the midst of busy careers. And of course, now that we do all the forums online, more people with fulltime jobs can participate.
Recent forum topics have included affordable housing, the efforts to return passenger rail across the southern, more populated part of the state, parking problems and solutions in downtown Bozeman, and the upcoming vote on whether or not to create and fund a commission and make recommendations as to reforms of city and county governments. January 2024 featured a “Report to the Stakeholders” with representatives of the local school system, the Bozeman City Parks and Recreation Department, and the Gallatin County Rest Home reporting on what had been accomplished with the funds raised when citizens voted to increase their property taxes with new or increased mill levies.
Program topics are selected by OLLI-MSU’s Friday Forum committee which I have had the challenge and privilege of serving on for the past three years (the past two as the Chairperson). Once a topic is chosen, a committee member agrees to be responsible for that program: recruit speakers on the topic, hold preliminary discussions with the speaker(s), moderate the on-line program- which includes introducing the speakers, and organizing and fielding participant questions and comments in the Zoom chat (with the help of OLLI-MSU staff).
Friday Forum goes back to the very beginnings of Wonderlust, the lifelong learning organization a few far-sighted retirees organized in Bozeman 22 years ago, which morphed into OLLI-MSU in 2019.
“We were concerned about community building,” says Dick Young, a retired physician who became one of Wonderlust’s founding board members shortly after he and his wife retired to Bozeman. “Four or six-week classes or single-shot lectures by university faculty were obvious. We thought one of the things we should try to accomplish was bringing more of the community together with a monthly gathering to discuss important issues, using university faculty or recent graduates as resources.” He adds that in addition to the university resources, expert speakers in those early years came from local think tanks, notably Headwaters Economics.
Because of his desire to see different segments of the community actually mix in person as they discuss issues, Young confesses to some disappointment with the current on-line format we’re using. Our migration from the community room at the Bozeman Public Library to small computer screens around the valley began in the spring of 2020, of course, with the pandemic. The current committee has found it convenient to continue on Zoom. In a boom town like Bozeman, there is always the problem of finding a venue that is centrally located, provides sufficient parking, and is available on a consistent basis. The forums are advertised as running from noon to 1:30 PM and we usually find that we need the full 90 minutes to present the issues and allow for the questions and answer segments. Eliminating another half hour or more of commute time to get to the venue and back to work allows more working people to participate and we would like to believe that meets – at least in part – Young’s goal of community building.
The current philosophy of the OLLI at MSU Friday Forum committee is that topics should be of local relevance and that, when possible, participants should come away with ideas or inspiration to get involved in responding to the problem under discussion. Dick Young tells me that in the early years the forums sometimes dealt with national issues. “In fact,” he says, “the very first Forum was on the Iraq War. We saw ourselves as doing a local version of the Commonwealth Club.”
Through the years, many forums have centered on environmental issues, growth and recent challenges and controversies within city and county government. “I think one of our early efforts was trying to see what could be done to get the city and county to cooperate on various issues,” Young says. We agree that is still a topic ripe for consideration in future forums and I scribble a note to myself for the next committee meeting when we’ll begin sorting out topics for fall semester.
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