From the judges: The "leadership rubric" that identified various descriptions for what makes a leader, and considering implicit bias and other factors in how leaders show up was excellent and very well executed. The ability to have intergenerational alumni work together, as well as allow this to happen virtually for volunteers and applicants on the scope and scale that was implemented was very impressive.
Scholarship Volunteer Reading Campaign & Virtual Training
Category
Alumni Relations > Alumni Relations Improvement
Description
Award: Silver
Institution: University of California, Davis
Title of Entry: Scholarship Volunteer Reading Campaign & Virtual Training
About this Entry: Question: How does a volunteer run scholarship program founded in 1934 pivot to survive COVID-19? Answer: Embrace technology. The Cal Aggie Alumni Association’s leadership scholarship program has a long established history and is almost fully staffed by volunteers who have been involved in the scholarship reading process for 20+ years. Although our volunteers are dedicated to the program, many of them are adverse to change. This year we had no choice but to make many changes. The first change came when we learned we would have to award our scholarships on a shortened timeline, with one less month to review. The only way to make this timeline was to increase the number of volunteers. We launched an all alumni volunteer campaign and a new online form to sign up (rather than returning a signed PDF via email), and we were able to grow our volunteers from 200 in 2019 to 317 in 2020. With so many new volunteers, we needed to be intentional about making sure they knew their role, our expectations of them, the scholarship criteria, and how to use our online reviewing system. As a result, we filmed a virtual scholarship training so our volunteers completed this important task independently. Finally, in a first for our program, we also needed to conduct all of our 500 scholarship interviews virtually. Despite these pivots, we were able to transition successfully and award 83 students $100,000 in scholarships this year all in a socially distanced, virtual format!