Staying Connected and Connecting Across the Years
Our hope is to help alumni stay connected with their classmates and to network our alumni so that we can connect across the years, especially for vocational mentoring, prayer, and faith and work integration discipleship. To see this hope become a reality will involve at least the following:
building a directory
Foundational to this effort is creating an up to date directory that can be used to help us get in touch with each other. Please fill out our alumni contact form to contribute to this effort.
A note about directory Privacy Levels
We take privacy seriously. For starters, the directory will be password protected and only available on this site, which is itself password protected. We call this level of privacy semi-public in that only alumni of Northwestern’s Graduate Christian Fellowship can see this directory.
For even more privacy, on the alumni contact form, you can opt not to have your contact information available on this site. Only the Alumni Network Leadership Team will have access to it so we can communicate with you and let you know if anyone is trying to reconnect with you.
As this is a work in progress, if you have any suggestions for what platform to use for the directory or on different levels of privacy, please let us know at gcf@u.northwestern.edu.
2. Planning reunions
As our directory builds, we can begin planning different kinds of reunions. Some might be class based (give or take a few years), geography based, vocation based, etc. Some might be big some might be small. We will rely on video conference calls to stay connected more frequently in between the larger in person gatherings. We’ve tested the video calls a few times with a more recent class of alumni and it worked well.
For reunions to happen more easily, it would be helpful to have one or more alumni volunteer to act as liaisons for their class, plus or minus a few years. If you are interested in being an alumni class liaison, please mark that on the alumni contact form and/or email us at gcf@u.northwestern.edu.
3. Mentoring
Imagine what could happen if we linked up all of our alumni in a particular field for prayer, encouragement, faith and work integration discipleship, and evangelistic coaching. What if other sister Graduate Christian Fellowship chapters did the same and we linked up alumni across schools by discipline/field? Beyond mutual support, what if we also blessed current grad students with our accumulated real world professional wisdom?
4. Photo and video Gallery
The Bible often repeats the admonition to remember what God has done. This gallery hopes to house reminders of what God has done over the years in and through the Graduate Christian Fellowship to remind us that we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses in the present day.