Why Should Delaware Care?
Between OLLI Wilmington and OLLI Kent-Sussex, Delaware has one of the largest lifelong learning institute memberships in the country. While OLLI Kent-Sussex is substantially smaller than its New Castle County counterpart, a recent major donation has the potential to help the organization expand among the large retiree population in southern Delaware.
Trudie Thompson is a self-described “baby philanthropist” — playfully stating that she is “no Musk or Gates.”
But the 73-year-old Wilmington native has made major donations to her alma mater, Middlebury College in Vermont, and gives money regularly to what she estimates to be about 25 smaller organizations.
Perhaps Thompson’s biggest single donation? A $1 million gift to establish an endowment for the Kent-Sussex chapter of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, known as OLLI, which offers college courses – without the grading and homework – for people over 50 years old.
“I guess I’ve always been a lifelong learner,” Thompson told Spotlight Delaware. “I’m interested in everything. So this endowment was the perfect thing.”
The Kent-Sussex OLLI branch formed in 2021 with the merger of the formerly separate Kent and Sussex organizations. Like the OLLI location in Wilmington, OLLI Kent-Sussex is affiliated with the University of Delaware and funded, in part, by a national foundation set up in 1977 by California banker Bernard Osher.
Thompson’s gift is the first endowment OLLI-Kent Sussex has received. The organization plans to use some of the money to establish a permanent location in Lewes and to continue attracting new members, OLLI Kent-Sussex’s program coordinator Monica Browne said.
Brown also said the money will help the organization to rebuild its membership following the COVID pandemic.
“We do get donations all the time from our members and from different organizations. But this is a new one for us to get this much,” Browne told Spotlight Delaware.
The Kent-Sussex OLLI has three locations – in Dover, Lewes and Ocean View.
While the Lewes location has been housed in different buildings over the years – including currently at the Trinity Faith Christian Center – Browne said she is focused on securing a permanent space for it to establish more continuity.
The origin story
Thompson said she became involved with OLLI in about 2016, after she retired from the U.S. Foreign Services, and moved to the Rehoboth Beach area where she realized she didn’t want her brain to “turn to mush.”
Since then, she has been teaching courses on her specialties – international relations and linguistics – and becoming progressively more involved with OLLI as a volunteer.
Karen Asenavage Loptes, director of OLLI at the University of Delaware, described Thompson as a “force in the area,” spreading the organization’s lifelong learning goals across southern Delaware.
But to Thompson, there is someone else who deserves credit for OLLI’s growth and success: Sally Cole.
“She held OLLI together when it could have just disintegrated,” Thompson said of Cole, who served as the program coordinator for Kent-Sussex from 2019 to 2024.
Cole was the program’s sole full-time employee during COVID, helping instructors and members with the arduous task of transitioning their courses over to Zoom.
Still, Cole gives Thomson credit for leading others in the virtual transition.
“Trudie was just instrumental,” she said. “It’s really important to have champions within the [senior] demographic to build support among other instructors, users and volunteers.”
But, Thompson said it was thanks to Cole’s technological efforts that the organization has continued to offer courses with virtual options since the pandemic. She said such options make OLLI accessible to members with mobility issues.
To honor Cole’s hard work in transforming the OLLI Kent-Sussex program, Thompson named her $1 million endowment the Sally M. Cole Lifelong Learning Fund.
Cole described Thompson’s decision to name the endowment after her as the “highlight” of her career to date.
“For her to make this gift, I was just generally blown away,” Cole said.
Thompson said she had first made OLLI a beneficiary of her personal individual retirement account a couple of years ago, but she only completed the paperwork with UD to make it official this past month. She said she wanted to get that done in case she “got hit by a bus,” or something else happened to her on an upcoming trip to Kenya.
A growing membership
Along with Cole’s efforts to bring OLLI online, the organization has been working to bring membership numbers back up since the pandemic.
OLLI had about 3,100 members as of fall 2024, Asenavage Loptes said. About 500, or 16%, of those members were from the Kent and Sussex areas.
While OLLI Wilmington has received endowments from donors in the past, Thompson’s donation was the first such bequest that the southern Delaware contingent has received.
Asenavage Loptes declined to comment on OLLI Wilmington’s endowments. According to a 2023 University of Delaware Planned Giving report, OLLI Wilmington had a total endowment of $7.6 million.
With an influx of people moving to Sussex County over the past decade, many of whom are retirees, OLLI leadership described the Kent-Sussex branch as well-suited to continue growing over the next couple of years.
“We are committed to supporting and reaching out and bringing in this population that’s coming into the state of Delaware,” Asenavage Loptes said.
Anyone who pays the $260 registration fee for the semester is able to teach and/or take OLLI courses. The institute offers over 300 courses each semester, Asenavage Loptes said, whose subjects range from a walking history tour of Lewes to Archeology 101, depending on what instructors feel like teaching at a given time.
While some OLLI instructors are retired University of Delaware professors, many are simply members of the organization that have knowledge of a specific subject and enjoy teaching, Browne said.
“The beach is wonderful, but you can only walk it for so many weeks before looking for something that really interests you,” Cole said.
Maggie Reynolds is a Report for America corps member and Spotlight Delaware reporter who covers rural communities in Delaware. Your donation to match our Report for America grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://spotlightdelaware.org/support/.
