To celebrate her 90th birthday, our team got the privilege of chatting with Clare Durst of Midcoast Senior College in Maine. Clare is a classroom cohost for the senior college, and she’s been working in the technology and nonprofit worlds for many decades.
We are proud to partner with her as she inspires and empowers lifelong learners. See some of Clare’s thoughts from our conversation below:
“Let’s see, in 1956 or 1957, I was winding transistors for the last vacuum tube computer to be built at Rice University, as it happens. After that, I was married to a mathematician who had work at the American Mathematical Society in Providence. We got a computer, no, a dumb terminal, at home. And we thought we were doing well when it hit 600 baud on the phone when you were dialed in.
So I’ve been working with computers for a long time, and I’ve been working with nonprofits for a very long time.
I saw that there was a need to have databases that were viable to get members and raise money. So I started working with some on this Maine island that I go to – Monhegan. Then after my husband died, my daughter and I moved up here to Maine, and I got involved with Midcoast Senior College.
We have four terms, two in the fall and two in the spring, of classes which last six to eight weeks. You can look at our website, midcoastseniorcollege.org, to see the kinds of things that we do. It’s definitely not basket weaving.
We have ‘William Hogarth’, ‘The Art of Storytelling’, ‘Brain Repair’ taught by an honest-to-God neuroscientist, and then ‘Humor’. So that’s some of them. There are usually 10 to 15 classes a term. As I said, there are four terms. The courses are almost always filled, or very close to filled; 20-some people a piece.
I guess if you’re old, you still want to learn. It’s there. People seem to eat it up, I must say.
I think we brought on Click & Pledge in 2016 or so. We have been using the registration package and part of event management. And you all were so helpful in helping us set it up so that we could make it work. This is a senior college. Everybody coming to it is supposed to be 55 plus. And yet, just about everybody uses online registration now. And that’s because Click & Pledge is easy to use. And it saves us an immense amount of time. And then we also use the donation things through CONNECT.
You aren’t intrusive about pushing things on us. You’re there when we need you, period. Very helpful.
As Kami (Click & Pledge CEO) may or may not wish to be reminded of, I called him George Clooney for years. And he plays a mean cowbell.”
