The Alumni Engagement Program is one of four VISTA-supported programs in the Rochester City School District. My VISTA position has been to build the capacity of the Youth Development & Family Services department to connect with the thousands of people who have graduated from Rochester City Schools. The purpose of this is to engage role models from the community in supporting proven and promising youth programs, with the end result of improving academic engagement and performance across the district.

I am proud to say that I have built an infrastructure for RCSD Alumni Engagement from the ground up, with support and guidance from the department of Youth Development & Family Services, particularly my supervisor, who is head of the Office of Community Partnerships. We started with a short list of graduates from district schools, most of whom were teachers in the district who already spend a significant amount of time and energy working with students. In order to reach members of the Rochester community who do not work in schools, I developed an alumni website on the school district’s main page, a survey to capture contact information and interest in volunteering, a multifaceted marketing campaign to raise awareness and persuade people to volunteer, and a data management system to keep track of both new graduates and interested alumni.

After eight months of service, the program has engaged 46 alumni, or about 3 respondents for every 4 days that the alumni materials have been online. I created partnerships between the Alumni Engagement Program and 17 poverty-fighting community organizations in order to research best practices for recruiting and managing alumni volunteers and to develop a list of proven and promising organizations that were willing to screen and train alumni who were referred to them. The Alumni Engagement Program has sent graduates of city schools to work with current students as mentors, in-school tutors, after-school program assistants, guest speakers, robotics mentors, guest speakers, mock interviewers for senior projects, and donors to the Rochester Children’s Scholarship Fund.

One of the RCSD’s biggest challenges in implementing an alumni program has been effectively managing the volume of inquiries from potential volunteers. In the past, the Rochester City School District had not had the capacity to do this; I improved upon the old system (a single, huge Excel spreadsheet that was not editable) by creating a HTML survey that feeds data both to an easily searchable and editable database and to individual emails that present each person’s information clearly. Both of these formats can be viewed by more than one employee, which will improve the efficiency of my host site. The survey will also automatically suggest appropriate volunteer positions to the person taking it, which provides instant feedback to alumni about how they can help.

In addition to the school district web site, we are on Facebook: www.facebook.com/IamRCSD