Lawrence Berkeley
October 2020 Report
Submitted by Nancy Brown, CUCRA representative
Membership: The annual LBNL Director's Retiree Reception was held virtually at the Laboratory on June 25. The reception celebrates the new LBNL retirees and provides an opportunity to recruit them as future EX-Ls members. The Laboratory Director, Mike Witherell, gave a very good report describing the lab activities under Covid. The reception also presented an opportunity for new retirees to introduce themselves. We are considering new strategies for attracting more and younger members to the Ex-Ls.
Concerns: The Ex-Ls continue to be very concerned about retiree healthcare and members look forward to updated news from the upcoming CUCRA/CUCEA meetings, especially in light of the impacts of Covid. We continue to have meetings with members of other Berkeley retiree associations to follow the university efforts in health care. We also continue to be concerned about the impacts of Covid isolation on our membership.
Activities: Our quarterly luncheons are our most important activity, and they are currently held virtually on Zoom. Member preferences have guided us to make our talks more attractive to the general membership and we have selected speaker topics of more general interest. We have had both short and more traditional length talks to keep our membership engaged during this time.
Cary Sweeny, Director of the UCB Retiree Center, gave our first Zoom talk entitled "Growing Older in Your Home." Cary reviewed considerations for staying in your home, provided the various pros and cons of each, and gave us cost estimates for them. She also used the talk to introduce us to various Zoom features. Later in May, John Swartzberg, MD, a clinical professor emeritus at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health and an infectious disease specialist, presented an "Update on the Ongoing Coronavirus Pandemic." This was very well attended and is posted on the Berkeley Retirement Center website. In August, J. Keith Gilless, Professor and Dean Emeritus of the College of Natural Resources at UC Berkeley spoke about forest fires in a presentation entitled "Filling in The Blanks: Current Research on Measuring, Managing, and Co-exiting with California's Wildfires." In October, Gibor Basri, Emeritus Professor at UCB who was also the founding Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion at UCB, presented "Fairness and Affirmative Action: The UC Berkeley Experience." This very timely topic is on the ballot this November.
Retirement Center Interactions: We are grateful to the Laboratory for renewing its contract with the University of California Retirement Center. We look forward to working with the Center to keep our membership engaged. Many of our future activities will be accomplished using Zoom, and we all look forward to meeting in person at some later date.