Adult Education Programs

For many years our Colorado Springs World Affairs Council began and ended with the immediately popular annual series of luncheon meetings. The Broadmoor Hotel as venue for these occasions attracted many of the community's leading citizens and also helped draw prominent and authoritative visiting speakers to a widely recognized resort location. But lively interchange on frequently controversial issues of world affairs often collided with busy members' daily schedules. While retirees could afford lengthy mid-day sessions, active professionals found that difficult. So we have had to curtail the luncheon meetings rather arbitrarily. We soon discovered, too, that our growing membership included many people whose travel, residence abroad or professional experience afforded us a valuable resource here in the Colorado Springs community for mutual education. Hence, our efforts in recent years to broaden the Council's range of activity not only into supplementary programs for student education but adult education too.

The adult side has from time to time included evening workshop sessions where dinner table sized groups have worked separately to formulate tentative answers to current foreign policy issues, then shared their conclusions in a plenary forum. For the past five years more formalized discussion groups, meeting periodically in one another's homes have set their own agenda, recommended modest background readings, and then spent a couple of hours together exploring the questions raised -- with much greater opportunity for participation than the short question/answer format after luncheon speakers could permit. In 2006 we decided to add a few additional seminar sessions, to take advantage of local expertise to anchor guided consideration of particularly timely or urgent issues. A little more information about both these adult programs is available below.

Discussion Groups Program

For the past seven years our World Affairs Council has sponsored several small discussion groups among our members. Numbering from about eight to sixteen individuals each, the groups have met in one another’s homes about once a month during the fall, winter and spring. These sessions have allowed the members to discuss contemporary questions of international significance in more depth than we can achieve in the necessarily short question/answer format of our regular luncheon programs. Read More

Seminars

In response to interest expressed by members of our discussion groups, the Colorado Springs World Affairs Council is exploring the viability of occasional seminar sessions on timely international topics -- chiefly to supplement the discussion groups by taking opportunities to draw in local specialists to anchor and lead focused examinations of contemporary issues.

An initial seminar, devoted to the prospective impact of the 2006 midterm elections on U.S. foreign policies and international relations, was conducted from 4:00 until 6:00 pm, December 12, 2006. Two members of the Colorado College political science department, Professors Curtis Cook and Robert Loevy, made short presentations. They then participated in a lively discussion of their views and others elicited from a well-informed group of some twenty-five WAC members, convened at the College's Worner Campus Center.

We intend to follow up with a similar seminar, on a topic and with anchors yet to be determined, in the spring of 2007. If participant turnout and reactions continue to be positive, we anticipate making at least two of these seminars available each year. Announcements of when, where, who and what will go out to all members who take part in a regular discussion group and will be posted on this web site and announced at a luncheon meeting. References to appropriate background readings will be included. All interested members of the CSWAC who respond (subject to space limitations) will be welcome, and we hope to keep the seminars free of charge.