BY JUANITA KNIGHT | President , ARTA

ARTA celebrated its fifty-third anniversary at our Annual General Meeting on October 4 and 5 , 2016 . We are eternally grateful to the retired teachers of the day for their vision , foresight and advocacy , and who knew more than fifty-three years ago , that there needed to be better provisions and improvements for their hard-earned pension .

We actually have two anniversaries , the second one due to the vision of owning our own health benefits plan . To the initial visionaries , Ron Rhine , Ralph Levinson , Irl Miller , Dean McMullen , Dorothy Ungstad , Donald McCuaig , Dwight Miller and Denis Richer , we commend your knowledge and courage , as do thousands of our ARTA members who are thankful for it every day . And in the near future we will have a third anniversary to celebrate — the creation of our own travel trust fund to enable us to own our ‘ sudden and unforeseen ’ travel coverage .

We also had the pleasure of presenting ARTA – TW scholarships to children and grandchildren of retired teachers . These ambitious post-secondary students are looking into the future and the good of our society and following their passion . Congratulations to all who applied . More information on accessing our ARTA scholarship information is provided on page 23 of this magazine and on our website at arta . net .

The health of an organization is often measured by the willingness of candidates to contribute to our democracy . Thank you to our ARTA members who volunteered to stand for committee and executive positions . You and your work are celebrated .

The Communications Committee has been hard at work trying to sort out winners from the many excellent entries of the annual writing contest . These contributions will provide for some very pleasurable reads and perhaps even encourage you to be one of the contributing writers next time .

The Wellness Committee continues to publish information on the six states of wellness , focusing on emotional wellness in this issue . I recently listened to Dr . Brian Goldman speak on the physical effects of loneliness ; it is akin to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day . Loneliness is about our relationships and our health and about the health and resilience of our society . It ’ s far too easy for fraudsters to prey on the isolated or lonely when they may be the only ones who talked to them that day or worse still , that week .

• What are the barriers to our participation on a regular basis ?

• How can we identify and support those who are becoming less connected because of physical or cognitive barriers , lack of transportation , resources ( a nice word for money ) or loss of family or friends ?

• How can we mitigate the challenges of making meaningful connections in order to become a more caring society ?

How can we be proactive , and what will we do to become a more caring society ? What is your plan to help combat loneliness ? And on another note , how did you do on your

WIMEB project ? news & views WINTER 2016 | 5