News Staff Reporter
The executive committee of the Choate Rosemary Hall Alumni Association will convene today on campus for only the second time since the official reconstitution of the Association on July 1st.
The committee will discuss a number of issues facing the newly restructured organization as part of a Deerfield Day weekend featuring a number of alumni-focused events. These include an Athletics Hall of Fame induction ceremony this evening and a black-tie dinner in Hill House Dining Hall tomorrow night to mark the launch of the recent capital campaign.
The new association has made substantial progress in reviving communication and cooperation between alumni and the administration.
“It’s been incredibly successful,” Association President Woody Laikind ’53 told The News. “We’ve been in existence for only four months, and I’ve already received all types of letters from over 500 alumni, but we’re still really in the beginning stages.”
The Association is currently looking to expand its contact with the student body to the greatest extent possible. The standing committee on Student Relations is also scheduled to meet today with Sixth Form Student Council Representatives Steve Kwizera ’07, Janelle Fouche ’07 and Zach Remsen ’07.
“We’re trying to be a resource to students at Choate to the best of our ability,” said Laikind.
The formation of the new Alumni Association grew out of a sentiment that Choate was not as well-connected with its alumni as it should be. The Board of Trustees determined that the previous Association existing for the past twenty-five years was, according to Laikind, “a non-functioning organization. It didn’t relate to alumni, it wasn’t communicating with alumni—it didn’t do anything.”
Director of Alumni Relations Hilary Burrall shared a similar view. “The previous alumni association was basically there on paper, but was never really implemented.”
Therefore, the Board of Trustees called for the formation of the Alumni Advisory Council, a group of approximately thirty-five alumni including Laikind, to determine a strategy to improve connections between Choate and its alumni. The Council first met along with several members of the Choate administration, including Burrall, in April 2005.
“The Alumni Advisory Council was charged with creating and examining why Choate’s relationship with its alumni was significantly inferior to that of its six sister schools, including Andover, Exeter and Deerfield,” said Laikind.
The Council made numerous sweeping revisions to the charter of the Alumni Association, disassociating it from the parents’ group and entirely restructuring the Association through the creation of six standing committees headed by the executive committee.
The committees, consisting of Volunteer Admissions, Student Relations, Regional Clubs, Special Events, Nominations and Young Alumni, are headed by a chairperson and composed of a number of alumni. They confer at least monthly by telephone and seek to develop initiatives to benefit the school and the alumni community in their particular area through “action plans”, which are presented regularly to the executive committee.
The executive committee consists of the chairs of the six standing committees along with the president, vice president and secretary of the Association as well as the president and vice president of the Annual Fund. It too convenes regularly via telephone in addition to biannual in-person meetings on Deerfield Day and Reunion weekends.
The Association has worked very closely in its first months of existence with the Alumni Relations office on a number of projects.
“The most significant benefit of the Alumni Association,” said Burrall, “is that it is able to engage alumni in many different ways that are not fund raising related. … Our alumni relations office is three people, and we have over 16,000 alumni, so the ability to spread that out through volunteers is a huge help for us.”
One such project involving volunteers is the creation of the Volunteer Admissions network, a brand-new program through which over 300 alumni have offered to interview prospective students and to speak at school fairs across the country and the world.
Said Laikind, “It’s hard for a distant student to speak with anyone at Choate, but with the network, they can speak with an alum who can convey a sense of the school from the student’s point of view.”
Another mission of the Association is to increase the connection between alumni and the student body.
“One of the things the Alumni Advisory Council decided was important was having the alumni be more involved in the lives of students,” said Susan Farrell, Liaison to the Alumni Association.
To that end, the Association, and particularly the Student Relations committee is working to draft a survey to be given to all sixth form students sometime next term in order to determine how the students feel they could best be served by the Alumni Association, whether through job networking or connections to alumni of colleges they are considering attending.
According to Farrell, possible benefits for students could include “career mentoring, the provision of resources and information, and connections to alumni in particular fields of interest to the student.”
However, the most important effect of the new Alumni Association is the reconnection of the alumni themselves, with the school and with each other. As evidenced by the record turnout at the first Alumni Association breakfast held in New York last Friday, the reformation of the Association has sparked the formation of a number of new connections throughout the alumni community.
“Once you’re out of school for fifteen, twenty years, you loose touch with a lot of people,” said Laikind. “I received an email today from a Choate alum who lives is Trinidad who wanted to know if it was possible to track down a student who was a classmate of theirs, and that’s exactly the kind of thing we are able to do.
“Our goal is to find and to inform alumni that they can be part of the Alumni Association, that they can help in a lot of ways, they can help students at Choate, that they can come back to Choate and find a place for themselves. That’s our goal. And I would say it’s been a wonderful success so far.”
