Retirees' Association of Lakehead University
The Retirees' Association of Lakehead University (RALU) is a volunteer association of retired staff and faculty of Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, which also welcomes their spouses, partners and other companions. It was set up in 2007–2008 to look after its members' interests, to build better relations with the university and to keep former colleagues in touch, and it belongs to the College and University Retiree Associations of Canada (CURAC/ARUCC).[1] It has an executive committee and a Program Committee, holds regular lunches and meetings, publishes the newsletter RALU News, maintains a website, and keeps a private Facebook group for members.[2]
Purposes and principles
Tarun Ghose, then president of CURAC/ARUCC, gave the founders two goals to aim at: to forge better relations with the parent university and to "look after" the members.[1] The association's own account says that its principles come down to equality and inclusiveness: the usual hierarchy of the university is replaced by a single rank, member, and members include former employees and their spouses or companions. The founders also decided that the association should be owned by retirees, which is the reason for the apostrophe in "Retirees'" in its name.[1]
A 2018 membership notice lists three benefits: social support among like-minded people with a shared background; "economic fairness", through a Pensions and Benefits Committee that represents retirees and aims to act as a consultancy for all members; and, in a joke, a higher-than-average "Fun Potential" rating.[3] Pensions were a concern from the start: much of the formative meeting was taken up with perceived pension problems, and the first steering-team minutes discuss solvency and irregularities in valuing pensions.[1]
History
A formative meeting was held in November 2007, and thirty-eight people signed an account book bought for the purpose by Dr. Clement Kent. A steering team was struck, and two members travelled to Kingston to meet the secretary of CURAC/ARUCC, George Brandie, and representatives of Queen's University's retiree executive; the Queen's constitution became the model for RALU's own.[1] The steering team's executive then met over several weeks in early 2008 at the studio of the Thunder Bay International Fine Arts Association on South Algoma Street, whose president Pasquale Scarcello offered the space free of charge, to draft the constitution and work out how to proceed.[1]
By March 2009 the association had 71 members, scattered from across Canada and the United States to China, Mauritius and Scotland, and by June 73.[4][5] Brian Phillips, the president, reported on the CURAC annual conference held at the Université de Moncton on 20–22 May 2009, noting that many CURAC member associations are limited to retired faculty, librarians and administrators, while RALU, like a few others, includes all employees of the university.[5] In August 2010 Phillips wrote that 2010–2011 would be his third and final year as president and welcomed Dave Kemp as the incoming vice-president;[6] by September 2011 Kemp was president, with Clem Kent as vice-president and Phillips as immediate past president.[7] Kemp was still president in 2018.[3]
Membership
Membership runs from 1 September to 31 August. The early fee was $10 a year with equal status for retirees, spouses and partners, and from 2010 a three-year membership could be bought for $25.[5][8] In 2018 the annual fee was still $10, with multi-year memberships available.[3]
Members in June 2009
The June 2009 issue of RALU News printed a "Who are we?" list of the association's members, 75 names in all, although the same issue puts the membership at 73. The names are listed below; those that are linked belong to people whose pages already tie them to the association, and the others have not been identified beyond the name.[5]
Ken Allen, Wim Baarschers, Debra Babcock, Barb Barber, Lynn Barber, Ralph Birston, Sharon Bjorklund, Marg Boone, Tony Cappello, Willard Carmean, Margaret Carter, Jean Charman, Anita Chen, Minsun Chen, Carol Coolen, John Coolen, Kathy Crewdson, Ken Dawson, Bob Day, Ian Dew, Ruth Dundas, Bill Eames, Ernie Epp, Trudy Epp, Robert Farmer, Colin Graham, John Griffith, Margaret Hawton, Joy Himmelman, Dave Holah, Jim Kayll, Manfred Kehlenbeck, Dave Kemp, Pat Kemp, Clem Kent, Elizabeth Kent, Jerzy Kiszka, George Kondor, Murray Lankester, Ron Lappage, Cynthia Loos, Dick MacGillivray, Lucy Mah, Peter Mah, Abdul Mamoojee, Donna McLeod, Rod McLeod, Iris Miller, Les Miller, Roger Mitchell, Walter Momot, Jean Morrison, Ken Morrison, Henry North, Dave Parsons, Pentti Paularinne, Brian Phillips, Jenny Phillips, Linda Phillips, Margot Ponder, Ann Roddy, Dennis Roddy, Ed Setliff, Jim Stafford, Beverley Stefureak, Joe Stewart, Bryan Townson, Gilbert Vanson, Pat Vervoort, Raja Warkentin, Don Watson, Neil Weir, Geraldine White, Bonny Wigmore, K.C. Yang.
Governance and committees
In October 2017 the executive consisted of Dave Kemp (president), Ian Dew (vice-president), Bonny Wigmore (treasurer), Bev Stefureak (membership secretary) and Brian Phillips (immediate past president), with the post of recording secretary vacant. Its Communications Committee was made up of Dew as newsletter editor, Walter Momot, Phillips as webmaster and Abdul Mamoojee as proofreader.[9] Other bodies mentioned in the newsletters include the Program Committee, which organises talks and trips, and the Pensions and Benefits Committee.[3]
Activities
RALU's programme includes talks and presentations by members, an annual field trip (the one in 2010 was on Saturday 2 October),[6] tours such as the May 2017 visit to the Claude Garton Herbarium on the Thunder Bay campus of Lakehead University, led by the member Lada Malek and the curators,[1] a series of monthly lunches, a film society and a games night that was still "a work in progress" in 2018.[3]
RALU News
RALU News is the association's newsletter, issued about four times a year (ISSN 1918-4581) and free with membership; a non-member paid $20 an issue. Its editor was Ian F. Dew. Back issues from the beginning to volume 5, number 4 (2013) were also deposited with Library and Archives Canada.[3] The association's website carries 25 issues in PDF, from volume 1, number 2 (March 2009) to volume 10, number 3 (May 2018), and each of them is archived on datum.locker in the table below.[10]
| Volume | Number | Date | datum.locker |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | March 2009 | Archived copy |
| 1 | 3 | June 2009 | Archived copy |
| 2 | 2 | August 2010 | Archived copy |
| 3 | 1 | December 2010 | Archived copy |
| 3 | 2 | April 2011 | Archived copy |
| 4 | 1 | September 2011 | Archived copy |
| 4 | 2 | December 2011 | Archived copy |
| 4 | 3 | March 2012 | Archived copy |
| 5 | 1 | June 2012 | Archived copy |
| 5 | 2 | September 2012 | Archived copy |
| 5 | 3 | December 2012 | Archived copy |
| 5 | 4 | March 2013 | Archived copy |
| 6 | 2 | February 2014 | Archived copy |
| 6 | 3 | April 2014 | Archived copy |
| 7 | 1 | September 2014 | Archived copy |
| 7 | 2 | December 2014 | Archived copy |
| 7 | 3 | March 2015 | Archived copy |
| 8 | 1 | September 2015 | Archived copy |
| 8 | 2 | January 2016 | Archived copy |
| 8 | 3 | July 2016 | Archived copy |
| 9 | 1 | November 2016 | Archived copy |
| 9 | 2 | May 2017 | Archived copy |
| 10 | 1 | October 2017 | Archived copy |
| 10 | 2 | February 2018 | Archived copy |
| 10 | 3 | May 2018 | Archived copy |
Website, social media and radio
In April 2011 the association described its communication structure as a website at ralu.la, a series of e-mail broadcasts and the newsletter.[11] A redesigned website was announced in 2014–2015 by Kathy Traynor and Ian Dew, built with the help of Thunder Bay Information Technology Solutions, and moved to the address www.lakeheadretirees.ca.[12] By 2018 members were also communicating through a Facebook group.[3]
The association also promoted Senior Moments, a half-hour weekly programme on CILU-FM (102.7 FM) of interviews with older members of the community, as "RALU on the radio"; in May 2017 it aired at 8:30 a.m. on Saturdays and 1:30 p.m. on Mondays.[1] The programme won the Best Current Affairs Show award for 2015 from the National Campus Radio Association.[13]
In Memoriam page
RALU's website carries an In Memoriam page that posts obituaries of deceased members and others, both to inform members and as an archive, and the association notes that it sometimes learns of a death long after publication. The page lists 27 people, whose deaths run from May 2015 to February 2023, and as of 31 October 2026 it appears not to have been updated since early 2023. The most recent entry is for Alan Noel Hughes.[2]
Members memorialized
On the website's In Memoriam page
- Alan Noel Hughes (died February 2023)
- Jenny Phillips (died May 2022)
- Min-Sun Chen (died May 2021)
- Balaji Venkatesagowda (died May 2021)
- Joseph David Stewart (died March 2021)
- Linda Carolyn Phillips (died March 2021)
- Sabah Mansour (died February 2021)
- Frederick Franklin Gilbert (died November 2020)
- Claude Liman (died September 2020)
- Clement Fisher Kent (died August 2020)
- Pradip Ranjan Sarbadhikari (died June 2020)
- Richard MacGillivray (died June 2020)
- Stanley Magwood (died May 2020)
- Anita Beltran Chen (died January 2020)
- Peter Seyffert (died November 2019)
- Bonny Wigmore (died September 2019)
- Ann Osborn Seyffert (died February 2019)
- George Kondor (died January 2019)
- Bruce Minore (died 2018)
- John Naysmith (died September 2017)
- Bill Graham (died August 2017)
- Tom Hazenberg (died June 2017)
- Matt Stefureak (died July 2017)
- Bill Eames (died March 2017)
- Don MacLean (died March 2017)
- Lisle Thomson (died March 2016)
- David Lewis (died May 2015)
Remembered in RALU News
The newsletters of 2009–2018 carry few formal obituaries; deaths appear mostly in editorials, reports and notes. The people below are named there and have their own pages. Some identifications are probable rather than certain, and the individual pages say so.
- Ken Morrison (died July 2010) – social and political activist and early Lakehead extension worker
- Cathy Chapin (died October 2010) – colleague mourned in the December 2010 issue; identity probable
- Marcia Dilley (died September 2011) – psychologist in Lakehead's Department of Psychology, 1967–1992
- Helen E. H. Smith (died before March 2012) – historian in History and Women's Studies at Lakehead; mourned in March 2012
- Sharon Bjorklund (died November 2012) – Registrar's Office, 43 years
- David Robert Wigmore (died October 2012) – husband of Bonny Wigmore, remembered in December 2012
- Shawn Perring (died July 2015) – Lakehead Thunderwolves hockey defenceman, noted in September 2015
- Graham Borradaile (died May 2017) – Lakehead geology academic; named in the October 2017 editorial
- William Sears (died 2016–2017) – named in the October 2017 editorial
- Will Carmean (died December 2017) – sustainable forestry academic; "Walk with Will" in 2018
- Hank Åkervall (died February 2000) – Olympic ice hockey defenceman with Lakehead connections, recalled in February 2018
See also
- Lakehead University
- College and University Retiree Associations of Canada
- Category:Lakehead Retirees In Memoriam
- Category:RALU News In Memoriam
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 "In the Beginning", PDF pp. 1–2, RALU News, vol. 9, no. 2 (May 2017), Retirees' Association of Lakehead University. Archived copy on datum.locker (original PDF listed at the association's archived newsletters page).
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 In Memoriam, Retirees' Association of Lakehead University (page fetched 31 October 2026; archived copy on datum.locker).
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 Membership benefits, PDF p. 18, RALU News, vol. 10, no. 3 (May 2018), Retirees' Association of Lakehead University. Archived copy on datum.locker (original PDF listed at the association's archived newsletters page).
- ↑ "Membership in RALU", PDF p. 7, RALU News, vol. 1, no. 2 (March 2009), Retirees' Association of Lakehead University. Archived copy on datum.locker (original PDF listed at the association's archived newsletters page).
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Membership notice, PDF p. 8, RALU News, vol. 1, no. 3 (June 2009), Retirees' Association of Lakehead University. Archived copy on datum.locker (original PDF listed at the association's archived newsletters page).
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 President message, PDF p. 2, RALU News, vol. 2, no. 2 (August 2010), Retirees' Association of Lakehead University. Archived copy on datum.locker (original PDF listed at the association's archived newsletters page).
- ↑ Executive list, PDF p. 6, RALU News, vol. 4, no. 1 (September 2011), Retirees' Association of Lakehead University. Archived copy on datum.locker (original PDF listed at the association's archived newsletters page).
- ↑ Membership notice, PDF p. 13, RALU News, vol. 3, no. 1 (December 2010), Retirees' Association of Lakehead University. Archived copy on datum.locker (original PDF listed at the association's archived newsletters page).
- ↑ Executive and committee lists, PDF p. 6, RALU News, vol. 10, no. 1 (October 2017), Retirees' Association of Lakehead University. Archived copy on datum.locker (original PDF listed at the association's archived newsletters page).
- ↑ Archived Newsletters, Retirees' Association of Lakehead University (page accessed 31 October 2026).
- ↑ "Communications", PDF p. 3, RALU News, vol. 3, no. 2 (April 2011), Retirees' Association of Lakehead University. Archived copy on datum.locker (original PDF listed at the association's archived newsletters page).
- ↑ "The New Website", PDF pp. 1–2, 11, RALU News, vol. 7, no. 3 (March 2015), Retirees' Association of Lakehead University. Archived copy on datum.locker (original PDF listed at the association's archived newsletters page).
- ↑ "An Award for CILU Radio", PDF p. 7, RALU News, vol. 8, no. 3 (July 2016), Retirees' Association of Lakehead University. Archived copy on datum.locker (original PDF listed at the association's archived newsletters page).