Your alumni relations team
PHOTO BY KEITH WALTERS ’11
If you want to volunteer, if you want to organize an alumni chapter of the SGAA, if want to make a suggestion or ask a question, call the Office of Alumni Relations at 585-245-5506 or visit uknight.geneseo.edu.
Michelle Walton Worden ’92, left, Amanda McCarthy, Ronna Gillam and Tracy Young Gagnier ’93 BUFFUM
LAMOREAUX
association will bring to Geneseo alumni is to elevate the importance of natural alumni affinity groups, like the WGSU alumni or the Mudcats or regional groups. From now on, any alumni group that has a designated leader and meets at least once a year — either in person, or virtually for those that are geographically dispersed — may become an official SGAA alumni chapter. The leaders of all the chapters will constitute the SGAA Assembly. The Assembly will meet once a year on the Geneseo campus and elect members to the SGAA board of directors. But alumni chapters will enjoy much more than a vote. The Mudcat’s soon-to-be alumni chapter has been road-testing the benefits of working with Geneseo’s Office of Alumni Relations. Keene started the group in conjunction with his 10th reunion by sending emails to Mudcat alums he knew. Eventually, as the group grew, he connected with Tracy Gagnier, assistant director of alumni relations, who now supports a variety of things associated with the group: the annual Mudcat game by hosting registration on the Geneseo alumni relations website, 20
geneseo scene
maintaining a Mudcat address list and sending email blasts announcing the year’s event, renting Batavia’s Dwyer Stadium for the game, securing the necessary insurance, and — most essentially — buying the baseballs and arranging the after-game reception. “It’s been a nice partnership,” Keene says. “It’s seamless.” Great Knight, the burgeoning two-yearold event that brings Geneseo alumni together in different regions on the same night, is another demonstration of how alumni chapters will benefit by working with the college. Amanda McCarthy, assistant director of alumni relations, supports regional alumni chapters by helping plan and promote the event. She pulls alumni addresses for email invitations — everyone in a 50-mile radius from Houston, Texas, for example — provides support for the event venue and helps manage social media around the event. There were 22 regions represented on the first Great Knight, 31 on the second. The SGAA Assembly will eventually be a kind of United Nations of Geneseo alumni chapters, representing any and every affiliation that holds alumni together, from ath-
letics teams to Greek life, English to Geneseo First Response, from multicultural affinity to orientation advisors. “Whatever your passion is, whatever your connection back to Geneseo, we can accommodate it,” says Ronna Bosko Gillam, director of alumni relations and executive director of the SGAA. She wants anyone who’d like to get more involved with alumni relations to call her office (see box). What Gillam and her colleagues in alumni relations and Battles all know is that when alumni engage with each other and with Geneseo, they make the college they love stronger. For alumni, the association with other alumni has many benefits, from networking to fun. For Clare Cusack, in the vastness of New York City, it means “you have a little Geneseo community where you are.” Even if it’s just a chance encounter. All you need to say is, “I went there, too!”