June 29, 2002

1. Welcome
2. President's speech (state of the state—click here to read)
   1. IAA Strategy
      1. building relationship with IMSA
      2. financial groundwork
      3. communications groundwork
   2. IAA Annual Events
      1. Alumni College Day
      2. Lumen Weekend
      3. Reunion Weekend
   3. Regional Clubs
   4. Database
   5. Listservs
   6. Growing the IAA
3. Elections
   1. Intros of present candidates
   2. Write-in candidates: Tessone, Knisely, Baluta, Prude
   3. Ballot handouts, voting, etc.
4. Regional Clubs
   1. Club Charter Proposals:
      1. DC—August Jackson '93
      2. Pittsburgh—Joanna Messer '97
      3. SF
      4. Research Triangle Park—Shawna Schnorr '91
      5. Boston
   2. Discussion of what chartering means:
      1. Completely self-funding
      2. Have access to alumni database
      3. Help from IMSA with targeted mailings
   3. Clubs chartered
   4. Discussion
      1. All events with alcohol must carry liability insurance, per IMSA
      2. New clubs must be chartered at the annual meeting. Interested areas are always welcome at any time—contact August Jackson.
5. Constitutional changes
   1. Change to elections
   2. Change to IAA goals—aligned with direction of IAA, primary interest in alumni
   3. Minor change in wording from Kimmitt (“such as college and career advice or mentoring”.)
   4. Both amendments passed
6. IMSA Update—Cathy Veal, VP of Advancement
   1. Overview of governmental relations
   2. State of IMSA, then hammer fell with financial news
   3. Positioning for restoration
   4. State is not off the hook for their commitment to IMSA. Cuts send a message.
   5. How did this happen?
      1. Sen. Rauschenberger spearheaded
      2. Disaggregating the budget (IMSA's)
      3. Viewing budget/students—not proper math
      4. $3mil for outreach originally lopped off
      5. Worked quiet lobby in Springfield
      6. $2.5mil cut in final Senate budget (for “MSA”)
      7. Gov. Ryan killed budget (it wasn't balanced, but by law had to be)
      8. Went back to orig Senate version w/$2.5 mil cut, ratified, all cuts from personnel line.
   6. IMSA usually treated with BHE, colleges took 6.5% cut, IMSA took 24% reduction
   7. Next up—getting grassroots effort going. IL residents should write congresspeople. Former IL residents should write congresspeople from old districts.
   8. 25 people losing jobs; rest of $$ will come from not filling vacancies, reductions in salary (all staff are taking involuntary furloughs), moving 12-month positions to 10-month
   9. Continue to have commitment to alumni outreach (especially the database)
   10. Want to step back, reevaluate, speak to alumni at Lumen
7. Q&A
   1. Who's pro-IMSA in next election?
      1. Ryan and Blagojevich mild supporters of IMSA but not avid
8. Election Results—At-large Reps for 2002–2003
   1. David Gabrius '90
   2. Matthew Knisley '01
   3. Margie Markey '00
   4. Doug Pratt '97
   5. Sendhil Revuluri '90
   6. Chris Tessone '00
   7. Jon Wagner '94
   8. Dwan Prude '97
9. Meeting Adjourned

State of the IAA—2002

Delivered by Liz Chilton, IAA President, at the IAA Annual Meeting on June 29, 2002

It's been a good year overall for the IMSA Alumni Association, but I have to tell you that the state of the state is somewhat precarious. We've accomplished so much—when I wrote this, I was surprised at how much has happened— but with the recent budget cuts, our future is not so predictable.

The first thing I want to do is follow up on a couple of leftovers from last year's meeting.

Some of you may remember my campaign promise to make the Alumni Association the voice of ALL alumni. Last fall, we mailed out an all-alumni survey. We got well over a hundred surveys back, from all classes, and some great feedback came out of them. Also lots of volunteers. If you haven't heard from us yet and you filled one out, don't think we won't call you. Some of you may also remember the resolution passed at last year's meeting endorsing the creation of spousal accounts. IAA officers met with IMSA administration in the fall —Cathy and Jerre and CNS folks—and explored the issue with them, voicing alumni perspective and encouraging the creation of accounts for spouses. After consulting legal counsel and conferring internally, IMSA decided not to endorse the accounts. If you'd like more information, please talk to me afterwards.

Second, I want to talk about the events that the alumni association sponsors which serve both alumni and current students. There are three major events at IMSA throughout the year—in the fall, there is the Alumni College and Career Day; in the winter, we sponsor a conference called Lumen Weekend; and then in the summer, we have Reunion Day.

The first major event of the year was Alumni College and Career Day, which Mia Markey pulled off with her usual panache. At least 30 students filled out surveys; possibly twice that number attended, plus some parents, too; 13 schools were represented by alums. The Career session, which takes place post-college fair, was a great venue for interacting with current students. Lots of questions were asked about life after IMSA, and alums were able to provide the perspective that only we have. I wish I'd had something similar when I went here. We are always looking for alumni volunteers to come back and plug their colleges at the College and Career Day. This year's is scheduled for Saturday, October 26. One of our new cabinet members will be coordinating it, but in the meantime you can talk to me.

Also on the college front, the IAA had a table at the big IMSA spring college fair for the first time this year. Interest was high—we talked to a bunch of juniors and their parents about life after IMSA and making college decisions. Plus, it was fun, and I got to meet all the cute little baseball players and sneak free coffee from Kim Vitek.

Lumen Weekend is a day-long (yes, I know) interdisciplinary conference organized around a central theme— this year's was community. Panels are developed by an alum “guest author,” and every participant is expected to sit on one or more panels. It's a whole day of sitting around and thinking about Ideas, and it's really fun, and a chance to stretch your brain in ways that you probably haven't since attending IMSA. All alumni are invited each year, and we also encourage alumni to invite friends and colleagues who they think would be able to contribute to discussions.

This year's Lumen weekend took place on Martin Luther King weekend at IMSA and had 38 participants—fewer than last time, but we had skipped a year in between, I was coordinating, and I'd been taking four classes in the fall so invitations went out way too late. This year we had our first legislative attendee, Mary Lou Cowlishaw, which was a real coup. Rep Cowlishaw has been a staunch supporter of IMSA for a long time, and recently gave some great quotes to the media in response to the budget cuts—so we must have made a decent impression.

Next year's Lumen will hopefully be two days long and a real weekend. It's the 5-year anniversary; the authors are Monica Jain '93 and Shawna Schnorr '91, and from what I can tell, it's going to be absolutely amazing. All of you are invited, of course. Please put it on your calendars and plan to come back if you can—it will, as always, be on Martin Luther King weekend.

Then today we have the class of '97 5-year reunion here at IMSA, organized by Ernie Cruz, and the class of '92 10-year reunion in Chicago, organized by Boon Meksavan. Both of these are IAA activities as well, and we owe the volunteer coordinators great deal of thanks for their time, dedication, and energy. I also promised Ernie my firstborn child. Enjoy the day—we're not quite sure how many faculty are actually coming to the faculty tea; they all seem to be on summer vacation—but have fun catching up with everyone, and take time to check out the archival materials that Marti Guarin has on display up in the library.

In addition to the three events of the year, the officers and the cabinet have been spending a good deal of time shoring up the foundation of the organization, setting alumni association strategy and direction, and building our relationship with IMSA. Jerre Henriksen started as alumni coordinator only last spring (it seems like she's been around for much longer) and before that, we'd been coordinator-less for quite a while.

As always, the area of primary concern for infrastructure is the alumni database. How many times have all of us given the proper address, only to have it not connect and to have mail sent to our parents? We've been trying for years to fix this problem both procedurally and application-wise. This year, IMSA has tried its best to come through for us; they've put time and effort into developing the working prototype that's out on the Web. Cathy's told me that the database project remains a priority for IMSA despite the recent budget cuts.

I do want to say that I know those of you who have tested the database — and I myself—have strong reservations about its usefulness in its present form, and about the platforms used to build it. It's a mixed blessing. The IAA literally spent years trying to develop the same thing. We had a lot of great ideas, but we were working with all volunteers who had a ton of other things going on in their lives. So what we've ended up with is not perfect, but it's better than nothing, and IMSA has been consistent in asking for our feedback. It should be ready within the next couple of months. A beta version's up on the web—talk to Brian Sebby afterwards if you want the address.

If you still need to correct your address —if you didn't receive the most recent fundraising letter about the budget cuts—please make note of it on the attendance sheet.

I don't think I need to tell anyone that the database and the integrity of the data within the database are both key to the IAA's success in the next few years. IMSA has made the decision to start fresh and not populate it with prior data. (I do not personally support this decision, but I have to live with it.) DESPITE this, it's still pretty exciting to almost have a working version of the mythical alumni database up and going.

We are also in the process of setting up alumni listservs—several for regional clubs, an lgb list, an IMSA and IAA announcement-only list, and a discussion list. We had some a few years ago, but they died—so we're setting them up again. There's a space on the attendance sheet to sign up for these as well. We promise, no spam.

Another area of infrastructure that has had a great deal of energy concentrated towards it this year is finance and fundraising. Josh Levin has worked tirelessly to coordinate with IMSA and to put some additional structure to the way we work with money. The IAA's money is all held and distributed by the IMSAfund. Money that is donated and designated toward alumni programs is specifically ours and is used for the alumni budget. Money donated to the IMSA General fund does count towards total alumni donations, but is not necessarily used for alumni programs; instead, it's used wherever IMSA determines the need is greatest.

Also, in the fall, we ran the most successful alumni fundraiser to date, raising over $6,000 this fall from about a hundred donors. This will probably pale in comparison to IMSA's current campaign, which Cathy will talk about, but it's worth noting.

Doug Pratt's done a bunch of work on communications and communications strategy in the last year, as well as constantly plugging the Acronym to all alums. The latest IMSAlum, the first in over a year, was essentially completely written and edited by alums, mostly Doug. He's got Acronym subscription forms in the back—he told me to tell you.

Gus Jackson has been working on coordinating regional clubs, bringing them out and dusting them off. You'll see that three regional club events are currently scheduled, one in Chicago at the end of July, one in DC, and one in New York. We'll be chartering the SF club a little later in the meeting, and 5 other regional clubs. We've run into some alcohol liability concerns with the regional clubs, which is one reason that activities started so late this year. Every time we have an event that includes alcohol, IMSA requires us to carry liability insurance. Most of these issues seem to be at least somewhat taken care of, and we're working around the issue of alcohol by having all-ages events, which are lame but necessary— and of course it's always nice to meet younger alums—anyway, that's how we're dealing with liability concerns at the moment, with unofficial events and with all-ages ones. We are totally dependent on alumni volunteers to charter and to run regional club activities— if you're interested, please talk to Gus. It doesn't have to take a lot of money. That's about it for all the activities of the last year. Thank you— so much—to all of this year's cabinet members for all their behind-the-scenes work, and to all of the IMSAFund staff for their support and willingness to work together. You can see we've all been busy.

This is the thing, though. We couldn't have done any of these things without the tireless administrative support of Jerre Henriksen. She couldn't be here today— she's at her own high school reunion— but before she came, we had little to no support for literally years. Everything we've done, in some part, is due to Jerre's help.

Unfortunately, Jerre's position was cut as part of the recent layoffs here at IMSA. Cathy's going to talk about them a little later—but they were hard, and they went deep, and we lost a lot of very good people, including Jerre.

We will miss her.

Alumni have been asked to show their support for IMSA, both in the recent fundraising mailing—envelopes are available at the back—and also in an upcoming push to contact local legislators. I encourage all of you to remember the positive things about being at IMSA—to look past differences that you've had—and to rally behind the school, to make the Illinois state legislature aware that they have enabled a great, wonderful, amazing legacy. Though we may not always agree on the execution of the vision, alumni and admin do agree on the ideas behind IMSA.

What do these cuts mean for the IAA? It's hard for me to say right now. Obviously, we have lost our central administrative support. Jerre coordinated the mailings; she helped the reunion coordinators— it goes on and on. She knew the nuts and bolts. We won't have that centralized coordination any more. Cathy has some stopgaps and solutions in mind that she'll mention later, but really, in a lot of ways, we're on our own. We'll need a lot of volunteers who can spend a lot of hours in order to keep growing this organization.

The cuts are discouraging on many fronts. The foundation-setting that we did at the beginning of the year seems to be largely irrelevant. Finances and the carefully prepared IAA budget are no longer valid—all of IMSA's resources, what are left of them, are understandably concentrated towards preserving IMSA and recovering from this huge blow.

Cathy has committed to continuing work on the database. I will let you know as soon as I have more detailed information about other cuts in alumni programming. Though we are currently going forward assuming that most events will continue to take place, we will probably not be able to grow the IAA as quickly as we had hoped. We will do our best to keep the programs we've developed— the alumni college and career day in the fall and lumen weekend—going. And we will do our best to keep regional clubs growing. It will be difficult.

It may seem selfish to talk about growing the IAA at this point. I believe that it's still worth the effort. I believe that as IMSA alumni, we are more than dollars. We are connections and thinkers and crazy wonderful people and conservatives and liberals and we have an awful lot to give each other. I have been dedicated for many years, and I will continue to be dedicated to the goal of a worldwide network that encompasses all alums who want to be a part of it, a network that can provide job and social and volunteer opportunities to everybody— people in math and science, homemakers, IMSA spouses—EVERYBODY. These people are our family.

With or without enough support from IMSA, I am committed to putting infrastructure in place to do this, and I am going to work as hard as I can this year, and push the cabinet to work as hard as they can, to make sure that it's still a possibility, maybe even an actuality, next June.

Thanks. Questions?