Are you curious about UMRA’s past or are you someone who simply enjoys working with others to put together innovative projects? If so, UMRA needs you.

In February 2021, the UMRA Board of Directors created a new committee to identify, recommend, and support “processes and structures that will promote UMRA's organizational continuity."

The Organizational Continuity Committee’s membership is to include a historian who "encourages and supports efforts to update UMRA’s history and facilitates publishing of occasional articles (e.g., for the UMRA News or JOIE) on the organization’s past." We seek an UMRA member to take on this role.

At present, our written history covers only the first seven years of UMRA’s existence, from 1976 to 1983. Please consider helping UMRA begin filling in the nearly four decades since then, whether in the role of historian or as part of a team working with him or her. (New special interest group, anyone?)

If the project becomes a team effort, there would be many pieces a volunteer might take on, such as collecting photos or researching a particular time period or UMRA project. Someone with an entrepreneurial bent might put together a proposal for a Professional Development Grant for Retirees to hire a student to scan old newsletters, board minutes, and other key documents from our archives and add them to our online collections (which currently go back only to 2004).

Although experience is helpful, interest is far more crucial; the volunteer(s) we seek need not have any academic background in history. If you would like to learn more, or if you know someone we should contact, please email us at [email protected] or [email protected]. 

—Jerry Rinehart and Chip Peterson, co-chairs, UMRA Organizational Continuity Committee