All about STAY

Why We Exist

Students and alumni, working closely with the Association of Yale Alumni ("AYA"), Undergraduate Career Services ("UCS"), graduate and professional school associations, and other campus partners, aim to:

Enhance the Yale experience for students by connecting them with Yale's experienced and enthusiastic alumni
Prepare students for life after Yale through career panels, networking opportunities, and mentoring
Encourage students to stay involved with Yale after graduation by providing them with alumni leadership opportunities
Inspire alumni to reconnect with Yale or enhance their current connection through meaningful interaction with the student body
Encourage alumni to inspire students through life experiences and insights
Contribute our joint time and talent to further Yale's mission in the world

What Drives Us?

With active support from the AYA, UCS and various Yale graduate and professional schools - and following a year of focus groups and the development of our strategic plan - STAY began life at the start of 2012. From the outset, student and alumni/ae response exceeded our wildest hopes: applying to serve as STAY committee volunteers, hundreds of students and alums each wrote hundreds of words to support their commitment of time and talent. STAY has already:

Attracted, as founders, leading Yale students and alumni/ae (e.g., the Yale College 2012 student body President)
Deployed 10 alum/student co-Chaired committees, each with six-to-25 volunteers (blended students and alumni/ae)
Obtained a challenge gift from an individual donor, aimed at raising $11,000 in seed money
Attracted a $10,000 commitment (with possible further support) from a well-known foundation
Supported syllabus-and-case-study driven Student Leadership Forums led by alumni/ae speakers
Co-sponsored more than a dozen Career Panels attracting hundreds of students and dozens of alumni/ae panelists
Enlisted Yale students - for the first time ever - as Site Coordinators for the 2012 Yale Day of Service
Committed hundreds of Yale students to participate in the 2012 Yale Day of Service
Began exploring multi-tiered mentoring (e.g., seniors-to-alums-to-grads-to-undergrads-to-at-risk-youth)
Created a database to deploy a hometown STAY summer strategy
Attracted internship and fellowship opportunities aimed at students and young alumni/ae

These events attracted many alumni and students who had never before participated in Yale-related alumni programming or events. Students and alumni at these events expressed a strong desire for a permanent organization that would bring together Yale's G&P students, undergraduates, and alumni. STAY's recent creation sprang from the energy, enthusiasm, and passion of Yale students and alumni seeking to foster community in new and powerful ways.

STAY's Strategic Role at Yale

STAY's committee volunteers and leaders exert a disruptively positive force at Yale. Traditionally, alumni/ae relations offices don't focus on students; likewise, Deans' Offices don't focus on alumni/ae. With STAY's platform, we affect Yale and the Yale's stakeholders in varying ways: by breaking down institutional boundaries, by confronting challenges that alumni/ae or students alone would find daunting, by finding/connecting existing resources, by applying technology, by inventing new collaborations, and by marshalling STAY horsepower to support resource-constrained individuals and groups. For example, despite harboring hundreds of student groups (each needing students to lead it), Yale doesn't yet offer to the entire Yale student community unfettered access to pure leadership training. Bringing Yale alumni/ae and students together in collaboration with the AYA, STAY has started to fill this void. Likewise, Yale has only begun to offer campus-wide joint student-alumni volunteer opportunities. Through Yale Day of Service student-alumni/ae collaboration, and recent international alumni/ae volunteer trips, STAY is pushing in this direction.

The Model

Student-alumni organizations exist at a handful of other non-Ivy colleges and universities. One-off student-alumni programs exist at some of the Ivies (e.g., Dartmouth's "Take a Student to Lunch" program). Among the non-Ivies with sustained student-alumni organizations, such organizations focus on various combinations of service/philanthropy, tradition/pride, and networking/mentoring. Here at Yale, STAY makes Yale a pioneer in student-alumni service and programming among the Ivies.

Key elements of STAY's model include:

Service, programs and events open to - and for the benefit of - the entire Yale community
Linkage between service and mentoring/networking
Dues-free membership, but with active committee service required

Structure

Volunteering for STAY's committees and working groups - or participating in support of STAY - is by application and is open to all Yale students, Yale alumni, University faculty and staff, and other members of the Yale community. All STAY volunteers must be active members of at least one committee or working group. STAY is led by an Executive Board, but STAY's mission is achieved through the efforts of our committees and working groups:

Outreach and Membership. Responsible for locating and engaging Yale students and alumni with STAY. The committee will review applications to STAY and recommend new members to the Executive Board.
Marketing and Public Relations. Responsible for promoting STAY programs, events, and opportunities throughout the Yale community.
Career Panels. Responsible for organizing at least 5 career panels featuring Yale alumni per year.
Mentoring. Responsible for developing and implementing a mentoring program. Mentoring includes undergraduate/G&P student mentoring as well as student/alumni mentoring.
Networking. Responsible for initiating networking events. There should be annual events both for undergraduates and G&P students.
Service. Responsible for promoting the Yale Day of Service, the Yale Alumni Service Corps, and other existing alumni volunteer programs to students. May also choose to initiate new service programs that bring students and alumni together.
Social. Responsible for bringing students and alumni together for purely social reasons both in New Haven and throughout the world.
Day of Service; Assembly. In conjunction with STAY's Service Committee, dedicated to working alongside Yale's alumni leaders and volunteers during key events such as the annual Yale Day of Service (yaledayofservice.org) and the annual AYA Assembly of alumni leaders.
Development. In conjunction with STAY's Board and Treasurer, responsible for raising funding to support STAY's events and programs.
Club and Shared Interest Group Liaison. In conjunction with STAY's Outreach Committee, responsible for identifying STAY student members to support ongoing dialogues and initiatives with various Yale Clubs and share interest/identity groups ("SIGs").
AYA Advisory. In conjunction with STAY's Board, responsible for ongoing suggestions for - and support of - AYA alumni activities.

What is the Unmet Need?

There is much for Yale students to learn about life after Yale, and many constituencies for which Yale could be doing far more - with STAY's help. We're spilling over with horsepower, but still in the process of obtaining longer-term funding. We've achieved STAY's existing progress - in areas such as Student Leadership Forums, Career Panels, and energizing the Yale Day of Service - without a single dollar of Yale funding. STAY now seeks to sustain leadership training, deploy a multi-tiered mentoring strategy, and to fund greater student participation in Yale's national and global alumni volunteer initiatives. In essence, STAY will leverage how Yale's alumni volunteers - newly teamed with (and as advisors to) Yale students - change lives. We can choose to congratulate ourselves on the progress that we've made in creating our new-and-positively-disruptive platform...or we can catapult STAY into meeting the needs of dozens of student and alumni groups not yet brought together, and of the hundreds/thousands of students and alumni not-yet-empowered to change lives, and - most importantly - of the countless lives beyond Yale needing help. Our choice is clear.