John Carroll held an alumni reception in San Francisco on April 29 in a move to “expand efforts to get together with alumni,” according to President Richard O’Hara.

Seventeen alumni “from a span of years” attended the reunion, according to Vice Principal of Academics Kurt Sudbrink.

O’Hara added that the “bulk” of the trip, including the reception, was funded by the school through money from the special events area of the budget.

“We want to expand our outreach and our connections with our alums. We want to tell them about things like the strategic plan, master plan, facilities plan, and capital campaign,” O’Hara said.

Sudbrink said, “Our strategy in our office is to begin to reach out and engage alumni. The way to do that is to go to them.”

The event allowed for “a lot of reconnecting and energizing of the alumni,” O’Hara said.

Also, following the trip to California, Sudbrink estimates that there are “eight to 10 thousand dollars in requests [for donations to the annual fund] sitting out there.”

San Francisco was chosen because, according to Sudbrink, over 70 alumni are within an 80 mile radius of the area. Those that attended included a “small, intimate group. There was a mixture of people from the late 90s, mid to late 80s, [and] then a couple of folks from the 70s.”

In addition, O’Hara added, “The folks who were interested in hosting an alumni reception happened to be there.”

The “primary host” was Todd Bradley, class of ’76, who previously won the Father Charles K. Riepe Alumni Award. When Bradley came to receive his award, he told O’Hara, “If you can get to San Francisco, I’ll help you plan an event.”

The reception began with a short program where O’Hara and Sudbrink updated the alumni on events at school. O’Hara said, “We talked about the master facilities plan and capital campaign and branding process and all of the goals that we have for moving the school forward.”

“Alumni want to know where the school is heading. They want to know that John Carroll is doing well and moving forward with this strong plan for the future,” Sudbrink said. “It wasn’t a solicitation for the capital campaign, but we did bring up the annual campaign and the ‘I am a Patriot’ challenge.”

Bradley also spoke at the event and gave a “wonderful testimony about his experience at the school and his love of the school,” Sudbrink said.

Bradley, Executive Vice President of the HP Personal Systems group, had closed a multi-billion dollar deal days before the event to purchase the Palm company. Sudbrink added, “It’s such a unique thing because he was in the newspaper the day before. You couldn’t ask for a better [speaker] than that.”

After that, there was a chance for a question and answer session, after which the event became “purely social,” according to O’Hara.

Following the event, “The alums were saying that they had to get something organized every year, whether or not officials from school could get there or not. They were very excited about keeping it going. They expressed that they didn’t know there were so many other alumni in the area,” O’Hara said.

Sudbrink added, “Everybody there was excited to hear about the school. They wanted to know how they can get more meaningfully involved.”

Because not all alumni in the area could attend, Sudbrink contacted others to meet with. O’Hara said, “We called more alums then we were able to see. We wound up seeing two others in San Francisco, one alum in Santa Cruz, and another in Sacramento.”

Sudbrink said, “It was just an opportunity to catch up with some alumni we haven’t spoken with.”

O’Hara is “very encouraged” by the event: “Beyond the people that were there, there were a lot of people that were interested, but their schedules didn’t allow them to attend.”

He added, “The alums were very interested in John Carroll. [They have] very strong positive feelings towards the school. [They] seemed to have an overall level of wanting to stay connected, know what’s going on, and want to come back to the school if they get back to the area.”

In the future, O’Hara hopes to hold more events in a variety of areas, including one in Southern California, New York City, and Washington, DC. Sudbrink added the possibility of a reception in Atlanta as well.

“Wherever we have a large grouping of alums, we’re going to do more outreach to them by bringing the school to them. Hopefully, once a year we’ll be doing these regional alumni events,” Sudbrink said. “Budget restraints keep us from doing too much of these.”

According to Director of Finance Kay Nichols, $3,700 was allotted this year for alumni events.

O’Hara added, because the “costs of travel [for school officials] are picked up by the school” as well as the cost of the reception, “we cannot do too many of them in a given year.”

However, according to Sudbrink, “As a school, we haven’t invested a lot of money into alumni events over the years. From a budget standpoint, our peers spend a lot more money in terms of personnel and to do more activities then we have done in the past. We’re looking at new ways of doing this but still being very cost conscious.”

Still, O’Hara and Sudbrink agree, “We don’t necessarily turn in receipts for everything that we do. We try to save the school money,” Sudbrink said.

Kate Froehlich can be reached for comment at [email protected].