The amendment was approved with an overwhelming majority of
votes cast and will be submitted to the Yale Corporation for
final ratification.
Concurrent Case Study Breakouts
AYA delegates and constituency leaders chose from the concurrent
sessions listed below. These breakouts featured Yale staff
and alumni, in particular, who have successfully created innovative
programs to engage alumni with each other, with students, and
with Yale. The same set of sessions was repeated in the afternoon
to allow participants to select a second session to attend.
Increasing Involvement through Special Programming – Successful
events remain in people’s minds for weeks, months, and
even years. This breakout focused on the many alumni groups
that have taken creative approaches to harnessing their special
strengths to plan events and create programs that connect alumni
in unique ways.
Taking Yale on the Road – In this session, participants
learned about some ways volunteer leaders have galvanized interest
and participation by taking events to destinations across the
United States and around the world.
Bench Strength: Developing a Cadre of Volunteers – Many
alumni constituencies have a devoted corps of experienced volunteers.
Assembly delegates and other alumni leaders learned how two
different constituencies have successfully benefited from the
knowledge of their experienced volunteers at the same time
they recruited new ones.
Engaging Students and Alumni – Reaching out to students
is invariably rewarding for Yale groups. In this session,
participants heard about three very successful mentoring
programs – Bulldogs, career mentoring offered through
the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, and the Community
Service Summer Fellowship.
Communicating with Your Audience: Harnessing Online
Resources to Deliver Your Message – From engaging electronic newsletters
to compelling Web sites, alumni volunteers are reaching their
audiences through the written word and the power of online
resources. With ever more people “online,” presenters
in this session discussed their efforts to reach out electronically.
Reaching Untapped Audiences: Attracting Diversity
in Your Alumni Organization – Every organization is richer
when its leadership and programming reflect the diversity
of its membership. Participants in this session heard about
the ways that special events focused on shared interests
are creating new kinds of Yale networks.
How to take advantage of AYA Online Services and
Resources – The
new Yale Career Network just launched in May and already has
more than 5,000 members. This breakout focused on this terrific
new resource and other online services available to alumni
such as the online alumni directory, e-mail forwarding, and
Web site hosting.
“Why Not?” with Barry Nalebuff
Barry Nalebuff, Milton Steinbach Professor of Economics
and Management at the Yale School of Management, gave a
presentation
based on his highly-acclaimed book: Why Not? How to
Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small.
As
his book suggests, Professor Nalebuff offered simple techniques
for generating ingenious solutions to existing problems
and
for applying existing solutions to new problems. He engaged
the audience in a number of simple exercises to stimulate
creative thinking, asking thought provoking questions such
as: Why not
have telemarketers pay you for your time when they call?
Why not sell a mortgage that automatically refinances when
interest
rates drop? To generate ideas, he posed questions such
as: “What
would you do in a given situation if you had unlimited
resources like Donald Trump?”
Alumni then broke up into small groups in the categories
of classes, clubs, online services, graduate and professional,
shared interests, and “radical thinkers.” After
a brief brainstorming session, alumni gathered back in Sprague
Hall report on their most obvious/most important Why Not? ideas.
In order for alumni to continue this creative brainstorming,
a Why Not? Web site has been set up specifically for the AYA.
Alumni can log on to www.whynot.net/aya to carry on their discussions
and brainstorming.
