Director of Chapter Programs, Virginia Tech Alumni Association

My name is Ginny Ritenour and I'm the Director of Chapter Programs at the Virginia Tech Alumni Association and as a team we split up the programs that we work on. We have our chapters assigned to us by regions, so we have kind of a portfolio of chapters that we work with and we guide the programming, we guide the volunteers and the work they do. We do volunteer leadership training. We have training sessions throughout the year, both in person and online and provide them the resources that they need to host quality events that represent the university in the way we'd like I to be represented. The day to day for me as the Director, I not only have my chapters that I work with so the individual volunteers with my chapters, but I also participate in our leadership team here in our office with other, we have a Director of Reunion Programs and Director of Career Programs and so we have a whole team. So, I participate in those decisions and meetings for the Alumni Association as a whole and engage with our Board of Directors. We have a committee that we work with from our Board and we also work with our development group here on campus. So, we have meetings about that and figuring out how we can interact with our annual giving folks in our reunion programs and how we can bring our volunteers into that role as well. Our schedule absolutely ebbs and flows, sometimes with the academic calendar, sometimes with just other events that are going on for our volunteers. It may be based on for example, when we're in football season, the football game watching parties are primarily what they're focused on, but then the spring can include speaker events, community service projects. We have student sendoff events all summer. That's another type of program where we basically provide a package for our volunteers and the training and the marketing for that. As staff, we are busiest in the spring getting them ready for those programs. We talk with our volunteers individually on the phone. We do online trainings and then we also attend Chapter events in person, not only to provide support but also to be representative of the university and provide a welcome and university update and that kinda thing. So, we also get the opportunity ourselves to be speakers at a lot of the events.