Alumni Gazette

In my first two months, I’ve participated in more than 200 meetings and events. I’ve attended a number of regional programs; talked with alumni, students, and friends; and participated in alumni and affinity group councils and board meetings. It’s clear that we have opportunities to build upon our excellent programs, and to help foster new and improved connections.

All of this has helped me formulate some early goals.

I want to enhance and build new programs that align with milestone moments in people’s lives—going to college, sending a child to college, having a family, retiring, and other momentous celebrations. We have so much we can offer our alumni, friends, and community as they move through important life stages.

It’s important to renew our focus on class and affinity-based engagement and strengthen our approach to diversity and inclusion, too. We’ve heard from a few communities who want this, including black, Latinx, and LGBTQI alumni, as well as those with ties to groups like WRUR, athletics, fraternities and sororities, and numerous others.

Creating programming specific to certain groups helps to foster and build trust. Our Alumni Board, Diversity Advisory Council, and other volunteer groups are helping us with this. Building inclusive programming helps inform ideas and perspectives that likely wouldn’t evolve in a homogeneous environment.

For example, at a dinner in New York City recently, a few black alumni told me about some of their experiences at Rochester and noted ones where they felt different and not included. They felt comfortable sharing those experiences with each other and with me. That’s important and can help us be better.

There’s an additional opportunity to look at historic milestones and build programming around them, such as the anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 2020 and the right to vote.

What did that mean for our country? For the Rochester region, which played such an important role in the suffrage movement? For women? For women of color who still didn’t have the right to vote? We want to have these kinds of conversations with our constituents.

I also want to look at how to leverage the academic resources here to offer compelling intellectual content for our communities. This means reimagining our Lifelong Learning program. For example, every summer we offer the Rochester Forum, which is guided by a great advisory council. This year, our goal was to make the event more accessible to more people, so we offered it as a live simulcast—making that rich intellectual content available to a much broader, even global, community. During this fall’s Meliora Weekend, we will offer a shorter Rochester Forum with a faculty member, a clinician, and a student musician talking about the new performing arts in medicine program, which is a partnership between the academic and clinical programs of the Medical Center and the Eastman School of Music. My team and I are talking about even more opportunities for our constituents to engage with our faculty. Our growing Meliora Collective is a good example of how we can better connect the University community, grow networks, and support professional exploration, which are important for students, young alumni, and, really, all of us.

We hope to grow our travel club, as well. Anyone with a connection to the University can engage in these transformational learning opportunities. Think Tanzanian migration safari with an alumni conservation expert. Or about adventuring in Spain with a faculty art and history expert.

We want to build on the successful programs for our volunteers, too. That includes more volunteer leadership training and empowering our volunteer leaders as ambassadors.

In order to develop the best programs, we need to know more about our alumni—because every person and voice counts. We’ll be sending out an alumni census this fall, which will help inform our plans.