About Us
The National Resource Center for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes
The National Resource Center for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes is headquartered at the University of Southern Maine (USM) and serves as the national center for the current network of 117 lifelong learning institutes throughout the nation.
The National Resource Center for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes plays a lead role in disseminating information on effective educational programming for older learners. In addition to providing information and connections via a web site, the Resource Center plans an annual national conference and provides a range of ways to help OLLIs to connect with one another.
The Bernard Osher Foundation designated the Osher Institute at USM as the National Resource Center for Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes in 2004. The Center is not a governance body, but is rather a center for excellence and dissemination of best practice models. Each Osher Institute reflects the culture of its own university and its learning community. The National Resource Center exists to facilitate the exchange of opinions, solutions and experiences among institutes throughout the country so that all can benefit.
The Osher Foundation
Thanks to the generosity of the The Bernard Osher Foundation, the network of Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes across the United States is meeting the needs of older learners who want to learn simply for the joy of learning and personal fulfillment.
The Bernard Osher Foundation, a 31-year-old philanthropic organization headquartered in San Francisco, supports higher education and the arts. Post-secondary scholarships are provided to selected institutions nationally, with a recent emphasis on meeting the needs of reentry students. The Foundation supports a growing national network of lifelong learning institutes for seasoned adults located at colleges and universities from Maine to Hawaii and Alaska. The Foundation also funds integrative medicine centers at Harvard University, the University of California, San Francisco, and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden as well as a career development awards program at NIH's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Arts grants, generally made to organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area and the State of Maine, seek to bring new and younger audiences to classical music and the performing arts.
