Crib notes to the AYA

View full image

AYA Assembly

http://aya.yale.edu/content/assemblies

Anyone who has successfully completed a term at Yale is technically a member of the AYA, whether they know it or not. But a corps of about 500 active alumni called “delegates”—gather each fall at Yale for a long weekend called the AYA Assembly. (It’s held the weekend of the last home football game in November, be it against Harvard or Princeton. Harvard years have better attendance.)

Assemblies, like bar mitzvahs, are themed. 2013’s theme was “New Haven at 375: Celebrating a Remarkable City.” 2014’s was “The Entrepreneurial Spirit at Yale.” The Friday of Assembly is spent breaking into smaller groups and cultivating AYA leadership; on Saturday, the AYA hosts a special tailgate at the Yale Bowl. The Yale Medals, awarded each year to exemplary alumni, are also given out during Assembly.

Delegates, who typically serve three-year terms, become so through various paths: they might be leaders from a regional Yale club, or from a professional school, or they might be “at-large delegates” with a yen to start up a new shared interest group (like the Yale Alumni Nonprofit Alliance, profiled below) or shared identity group (like YaleWomen, also profiled below). The idea is for delegates to return after Assembly to their constituencies with new organizational knowhow and a firmer connection to the AYA mother ship.

Regional clubs and associations

http://aya.yale.edu/find/clubs

The best-known Yale Club—the dues-funded Yale Club of New York City, with its 22-story clubhouse in Manhattan—is an anomaly. In AYA parlance, Yale “clubs” (or, interchangeably, “associations”) are simply regional groups—none of them possessing a rooted physical location—that host events for alumni in a given region. There are 120 functional Yale clubs throughout the United States, plus 60 clubs abroad. Domestically, the most activity is in the seven largest clubs (New Haven, New York, Boston, Chicago, Washington, Los Angeles, and San Francisco), with the second tier being represented by cities like Philadelphia, Seattle, and Atlanta.

The oldest such club is Cincinnati’s, which was born 150 years ago after alumni there gathered to commemorate the death of Yale scientist Benjamin Silliman. Chicago’s, St. Louis’s, and Boston’s clubs soon followed (in 1866, 1866, and 1867, respectively). In contemporary times, mixers and networking events are hallmarks of a regional association, as are the “summer sendoffs” that convene soon-to-matriculate Yalies from a region each year. A growing role of regional associations under the new AYA is to coordinate with the shared interest and identity groups, many of which are organized by regional chapters, as well as with the Yale Day of Service (since community service is by definition regional). The largest regional group is the Yale Alumni Association of New York—not to be confused with the folks with the clubhouse—with some 16,000 members; one of the smallest is Luxembourg’s, which has about 10.

Shared identity group: Yale Black Alumni Association

http://ybaaonline.org

This magazine may give C’Ardiss Gardner Gleser ’08 a number after her name, but she says her class year was never her strongest affiliation. Gardner Gleser came to Yale later in life than many undergraduates—she transferred from a community college at the age of 28, living off campus with her husband and children. She identified as a Timothy Dwight student (“probably because of Master T”), but felt an especially strong connection to Yale’s Afro-American Cultural Center.

So when the opportunity came to join the Yale Black Alumni Association, established in 2008, Gardner Gleser jumped on it. (She is now the group’s president.) The association currently has about ten regional chapters that are either active or in formation. The associations hold events similar to regional clubs with a focus on the experience and needs of black alumni; at a minimum a chapter is encouraged to hold a summer sendoff, a holiday gathering, a Day of Service project, and a Martin Luther King Day event, says Gardner Gleser. A principal mission is helping Yale with outreach to a more diverse applicant pool.

Gardner Gleser carries the torch for her small Seattle chapter; she has hosted events for as few as two people. “But once people are engaged, they’re connected—and they bring other people with them back to Yale,” she says. “They’re super involved, super excited, and they don’t remember why they’ve been gone for 30 years.”

She’s thinking of people like Rodney Proctor ’73, who confesses to a “love-hate” relationship with Yale (“great friends, learned tons,” but also was arrested for his radical politics—twice). The 25th anniversary of the Af-Am House brought him into the YBAA orbit, and he calls his 40th reunion in 2013 “one of the best experiences of my life.”

Shared identity group: YaleWomen

http://www.yalewomen.org

Founded in 2011, YaleWomen is the largest “SIG” (a term that does double duty as “shared interest” or “shared identity” group), with 55,000 members. Technically, any woman who has completed a term at Yale is a member, though Mindy Marks ’00, the AYA staff liaison for YaleWomen, says 8,500 members are active.

Like other identity groups, YaleWomen has regional chapters—18 of them, including several international chapters—that convene programs and events: 85 of them last year, with a collective attendance of 2,500. One 2013 conference convened 435 people from as far afield as the UK and South Korea; Justice Sonia Sotomayor ’79JD was a featured speaker. YaleWomen chapters have also coordinated Day of Service projects working in women’s shelters or with women refugees. And a blog on YaleWomen’s website has grown into a forum for topics ranging from the challenges of stay-at-home motherhood to the persistent gender gap in various professions.

Shared interest group: Yale Alumni Nonprofit Alliance (YANA)

http://yalenonprofitalliance.org

In 2008, Ken Inadomi ’76 became the head of the New York Mortgage Coalition, which helps low-income families towards home ownership. “I turned to the Yale alumni network to see if there were alumni groups to plug into” that focused on nonprofits, he recalls. “To my dismay, there were not any.” So Inadomi signed up to become an at-large delegate to the AYA Assembly, and by 2011 he was up and running with the Yale Alumni Nonprofit Alliance.

That year, YANA sent a survey to alumni in the New York area; the 900 responses have guided the group’s development, which has focused on the different needs of different age cohorts. For the youngest, YANA has lobbied successfully for more on-campus recruiting and career counseling by nonprofits; a new staffer in Yale’s Office of Career Strategy now focuses on the topic. For the mid-career age cohort, YANA convenes a nonprofit roundtable that meets quarterly in the New York area to talk shop. On behalf of retired or semi-retired members, YANA is developing a mentorship program as well as a service that identifies nonprofits seeking board members.

YANA estimates that at least three out of four Yale alumni—a total of about 100,000 people—are involved in some way with a nonprofit (even if only as volunteers). YANA chapters have launched or are in formation in San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC.

Yale Alumni Service Corps (YASC)

http://yalealumniservicecorps.org

Like Yale Educational Travel (see below), the Yale Alumni Service Corps sends alumni abroad. But YASC invites alumni (and sometimes current students) on community service–oriented trips to developing countries or low-income regions of the United States. Since 2008, YASC has led 16 international trips and several in the United States. Twelve hundred Yale-affiliated travelers have participated so far, starting with an inaugural 2008 trip that brought medical professionals into a mountainous region of the Dominican Republic.

“Though we’re on the ground for a short period of time, we try to make a long-lasting impact on the communities,” says Joao Aleixo, the AYA employee who coordinates these volunteer-led trips. YASC often leads trips to the same region year after year, and often builds on existing Yale connections. Three trips have visited a Nicaraguan community where the Yale School of Nursing has a decade-old affiliation.

A typical international trip lasts seven to ten days. Spring break trips have ranged from 65 to 95 travelers, including some undergraduates; summer trips may attract 75 to 200 travelers. (The much smaller domestic trips have focused on college mentoring.) Trips are sold at cost—“this is not a revenue generator,” says Aleixo—with a few scholarships available. Destinations have been as varied as Brazil, China, and Ghana, but one of the most unusual sights Aleixo has seen was a School of Management alumnus playing soccer with Dominican kids—while wearing a chicken suit.

Yale College class reunions

http://aya.yale.edu/content/yale-college-reunions

One of the AYA’s oldest functions is to staff the “quinquennial” (recurring every five years) Yale class reunions. According to Karen Jahn, who has worked at the AYA for more than two decades, attendance at these reunions has steadily grown. In 1996, just 2,500 alumni, or 22 percent, returned (bringing 1,700 friends or partners with them); in 2014, 4,300 alumni, or 31 percent reunited (along with nearly 2,700 guests).

A snapshot of 2014’s returning numbers is intriguing: 54 percent of fifth-years returned (“a new record,” says Jahn), 35 percent of tenth-years, 20 percent of 15th-years (“you can tell they’re busy having children”), and 35 percent of 20th-years. Most reuniting classes older than that averaged around 20 percent, with significant exceptions at the 25th and 50th years—almost half of surviving alumni attended each.

Running reunions gives a special vantage on the Yale community, says Jahn. She once hired an undergraduate staffer who later shared that the reason she’d chosen Yale was that she’d had a blast at her own mother’s reunion. And a few years ago, the chair of a 50th reunion reported that his best Yale friends were people he hadn’t known as an undergraduate.

Yale Corporation Alumni Fellow nomination and election

http://aya.yale.edu/corpelection

Yale is governed by an 18-member body called the Yale Corporation; at any moment, six of these members have been directly elected by Yale alumni, who vote a new member into a six-year term each spring. It’s the job of a special AYA committee to vet and choose the two to five candidates presented to alumni for that annual election.

Mark Dollhopf, who is secretary of that committee, says it finds candidates variously. “Anyone is free to nominate somebody,” though suggestions from Yale leadership—the president or the deans of a graduate or professional school, say—inevitably come with some weight. The AYA committee remains mindful of the current composition and needs of the Corporation—would a nonprofit leader (like MercyCorps CEO Neal Keny-Guyer ’82MPPM, whose term ends this June) or someone with investment experience (like Rhode Island governor Gina Raimondo ’98JD, who began her term in June 2014) best add to the mix? Racial and gender diversity is also considered. One thing that does not qualify a candidate, according to Dollhopf, is “giving a lot of money” to Yale.

Yale Educational Travel

http://www.yaleedtravel.org

The idea of selling deep-pocketed alumni luxury travel packages featuring Yale faculty actually precedes the AYA by a year or two, but it has since become a modest source of income for AYA programming. Yale Educational Travel currently offers 40 to 45 programs per year; trips have included a tour of London’s theater scene, an exploration of Mexico’s Mayan history, and an upcoming “Spice Tour” through India’s Kerala region. Some 900 travelers sign up each year for the trips, which are led by star professors with expertise in the relevant subject area.

This isn’t budget travel; a typical voyage often runs around $7,000 a person for a ten-day trip. “It’s luxury travel, no question about it,” says Kathy Edersheim ’87, an AYA staffer who oversees several of its global initiatives. “But it’s a reasonable cost for the experience you have, and you generate some excess revenue to support other AYA activities.”

Jim Boorsch ’55, ’58JD, is a satisfied customer. He says he’s been on “17, or possibly 18 trips—I’ve sort of lost track.” Though over a dozen traveling companies regularly solicit him, he keeps coming back to YET. “It’s difficult to explain without sounding a little elitist,” he admits of his choice of provider, but cites better organization, appealing destinations, and a set of traveling companions who are reliably “well read, well traveled, and know quite a bit about their field.”

Yale Global Alumni Leadership Exchange (YaleGALE)

http://www.yalegale.org

Like Yale Educational Travel and the Alumni Service Corps, the Yale Global Leadership Exchange also sends Yale alums on journeys abroad. But YaleGALE’s delegations have a specific mission: to help other universities around the globe strengthen their own alumni relations. Since AYA volunteers have a few decades of experience under their belts, they feel they have some best practices to share with partner universities worldwide. “Yale wants strong partners,” says Kathy Edersheim, who heads up YaleGALE. As many global universities struggle with a lack of public funding, learning to better engage—and solicit—alumni could be key to building that strength.

An initial trip to the Australia National University in 2008 was a success. Subsequent years have seen Yale delegations visiting dozens of universities in Japan, Turkey, China, Israel, India, the UK, and several European countries. There have been 11 trips so far, with a 12th in the planning stages. The 2014 trip, in which delegations visited four countries and met with representatives from 50 universities, reveals how the initiative has grown. “I’d been to many Yale reunions, but this took alumni engagement to a level that’s hard to put into words,” says Nike Irvin ’85, who went on a YaleGALE journey to India, and fondly recalls traveling alongside a diverse group, including “a most spry 90-year-old Yale Law School alumna.”

Several partner universities are clearly taking YaleGALE’s recommendations to heart. Before meeting with YaleGALE, the University of Tokyo had no employee focusing full time on alumni relations. “Now they have three people full time,” says Edersheim.