The Alumni Network (TAN) 2007 Conference
Alumni Groups Discuss Lessons Learned and Look toward Growth
By Adam Tapley
Former Fellow, Dartmouth Partners in Community Service (DPCS)
“Frequently those involved in social change and nonprofit work don’t have the idea that they’re going to change the world,” although they very well may, said David Bornstein, the author of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas and the keynote speaker at the 7th annual conference of The Alumni Network.
During the all day conference held Friday, November 30 at Princeton University, representatives of 13 TAN-affiliated organizations shuttled on foot between workshops, lunch, a best practices forum, and a presentation on Project 55 Connect, a new online community that will greatly benefit TAN. The conference finished with a speech by Bornstein and closing remarks by TAN’s founding director Chet Safian.
One workshop discussed how to establish an alumni-driven public interest organization. Panelist John Fish, founding member of Princeton Project 55 from the Class of 1955, noted that in the 34 intervening years between his college graduation and when he was first approached by a classmate about helping start an alumni-driven public interest project, he had only been to two college reunions.
“I wasn’t involved much before,” said Fish. The big question, he said, was: How do you find those individual alumni who would be turned on—like he was—to be involved in an alumni public interest project when they’re not necessarily already involved in ways that make them easily identifiable?
In other workshops, conference participants discussed questions concerning how to recruit agencies to host public interest fellows and interns; how to design a successful seminar series; how to recruit and retain alumni volunteers; and how to work with students during their application to the public interest programs.
After being broken down into smaller groups during much of the day’s activities, attendees gathered together for the Project 55 Connect demo, Bornstein’s address, and the conference closing remarks.
From left to right: Adam Tapley, Fran Elrod, John Fish, Nick Beilenson, Paul Edelman.
Bornstein addressed the eager crowd, discussing the role of social entrepreneurs. “Single-mindedness,” Bornstein said, was one of the most prevalent characteristics he had found among successful social entrepreneurs. Other characteristics he’d observed were the ability to self-correct, to respond positively to failure, and to “share the credit widely.” Successful social entrepreneurs tended to be individuals who attracted other talented people who would complement them, but also challenge them.
Noting the efforts by TAN and its affiliates to increase the number of affiliate groups and alumni involved in public interest work, Bornstein emphasized the importance of having good “visibility” of their programs and know “what they are saying when they talk about ‘social change.’”
The day-long conference proved to be a great success. "The conference oriented our individual programs within a broad movement of civic engagement and social entrepreneurship," said Sam Schiller of NUPIP, reflecting after the conference had concluded. "We exchanged best practices and tools designed to make our organizations more effective, but more importantly we articulated a vision for expansion and innovation." Creating opportunities for more young alumni to work in the public interest sector was an important goal of the programs, Schiller added, but he thought it was simultaneously important to empower "educational institutions to be catalysts of systemic social change" themselves.
"Every university should begin to see itself as producing talented and useful citizens," he said. "Our alumni networks serve as a bridge between professional success and civic responsibility."