News Release

Jim Mitchell To Step Down As Associate Director, Multi-campus Initiatives

February 26, 2009

Dr. Jim Mitchell has submitted his resignation as IOA Associate Director, Multi-campus Initiatives, effective the end of this academic year. Jim has been an Associate Director of the Institute for over eleven years, holding various titles. For many of these years he led the Statewide Advisory Committee, which brought together people from the academic and aging service sector across the state to advise the Institute. He chaired that Committee as it developed the plan for our current Statewide Advisory Council. Jim played a major part in the initial development of the North Carolina Gerontology Consortium and helped build it to its present strength of eleven universities. He currently serves as the IOA liaison to the Consortium. As part of the development of the Consortium, Jim developed, with Mary Altpeter, three surveys to address the need and delivery modality preferences of the aging services sector for gerontology education. Working in partnership with state agencies and provider organizations, this produced the largest survey of gerontology education needs yet undertaken in North Carolina. Jim has also been an active member of the planning committee for the North Carolina Conference on Aging, and he was Program Chair for the very successful 2008 conference held in Greenville. He is currently leading the retirement migration initiative, in which the IOA is a partner, based at East Carolina University. This initiative involves many partners investigating the extensive migration to the coastal counties of North Carolina, and will use this information to guide policy and practice. Jim will continue to be quite busy, as he soon assumes the Presidency of the Southern Gerontological Society, and he remains active with AGHE (The Association for Gerontology and Higher Education). IOA Director Victor Marshall wishes to express his great appreciation to Jim Mitchell for more than a decade of dedicated service to the Institute, and his particular emphasis on brokering relationships and projects across the state.