The Reunion Year

On a Saturday morning in June, on the velvet bench at the foot of a queen-sized bed in a second-floor bedroom of a 1928 Tudor on a quiet street in West Hartford, a sixty-eight-year-old woman named Mary Ellen Stallworth is sitting in a soft grey cardigan, holding a cream-colored envelope in her left hand and a small porcelain cup of green tea in her right.

The envelope is heavy. It is from her college, a small women's liberal arts college in western Massachusetts she graduated from in May of 1976. The return address is the alumnae office. The handwriting on the front is not handwriting; it is a font called Wesley Italic the college has been mail-merging since 2009. The card inside is a save-the-date for her fiftieth reunion, which is on the weekend of May 22, 2027.

Mary Ellen has been holding the envelope for forty-six minutes.

She has not opened the second piece of mail next to her on the bench, which is the gala brochure for a children's hospital in Boston where her late sister was a patient between 1981 and 1984. She has not looked at her phone. She has not, in the forty-six minutes, taken a sip of the tea.

The reunion office, in Northampton, has Mary Ellen Stallworth listed as unconfirmed on the May reunion roster, and as the holder of one $250 commemorative-class-brunch reservation, pending payment. Her giving history, in the alumnae database, is forty-seven consecutive years at between fifty and four hundred dollars. The annual fund team's coding on her record reads loyal, low-capacity, retention.

What is actually happening on the bench in West Hartford, in the soft Saturday light through the white linen curtain, is the most expensive forty-six minutes of attention the college will receive this fiscal year. The college has no idea it is happening.

What the reunion actually is

A fiftieth reunion is not a brunch.

A fiftieth reunion is the only event in a donor's lifetime in which the institution she attended at eighteen, the woman she has become at sixty-eight, and the legacy she will leave by ninety are all in the same room at the same time, with their hands free, on a clear weekend in late spring, with the question of what did this place mean to me, and what am I going to do about it hanging quietly in the white tent over the lawn between the chapel and the library.

The institution thinks the reunion is a logistics event. The donor knows it is a referendum.

She is, in the months before the reunion, deciding three things at once. She is deciding whether to come. She is deciding what the trip will be — whether to drive up the night before and stay at the old inn on Main Street with her freshman roommate Carol, or to fly in Saturday morning and leave by four. And she is deciding, underneath both of those, a third thing the college has been waiting forty-seven years for her to decide, which is whether the institution that gave her the four most formative years of her young life is, in 2026, going to be named in the third paragraph of the trust amendment her attorney drafted last March.

She will not name it if she does not come.

She will not come if no one calls.

The math the alumnae office has been running

The alumnae office, in Northampton, is running on a calendar built around the weekend in May. The reunion-year communications schedule has eleven touches between January and May, all of them about the weekend. Register by March 1 for early-bird pricing. Reserve your dorm room. Order your reunion T-shirt. Sign up for the panel discussion. Don't miss the class photograph.

Eleven touches, all logistical. Zero of them are a phone call.

This is a rational schedule if the reunion is an event. It is a catastrophic schedule if the reunion is the occasion the donor is using to decide a quarter-million-dollar bequest.

The math the alumnae office is missing is small and devastating. A fiftieth-reunion class of three hundred women, in a peer institution's published data, will, in the eighteen months before and after the reunion weekend, document somewhere between one-third and one-half of the planned-gift commitments those women will ever make to the college. The reunion year is, in the documented giving data of any small college with a competent advancement shop, the densest single twelve-month window on the alumna's entire arc with the institution.

The advancement office, in most small colleges, runs major-gift cultivation on a fiscal-year calendar that is allergic to that fact. The reunion belongs to the alumnae office, which does logistics. The major-gift office runs portfolios on FY26 quotas. The planned-giving office runs on a separate slow stream of bequest expectancies. The donor's life runs on the fact that she will be sixty-nine the morning she walks back onto the campus where she once cried, at nineteen, on the chapel steps at midnight, in 1973.

Three offices. One donor. One weekend. No call.

What the right twelve months looks like

A reunion year done well is not a louder version of the eleven logistical touches. It is one quiet phone call, in October, eight months before the weekend.

The call is from a woman in the major-gift office named Helen, who is fifty-four, who has been at the college for nine years, and who has spent the last three weeks reading. She has read every annual-fund letter Mary Ellen has written in the margin of a return envelope since 2003. She has read the Wesley Town Topics obituary of Mary Ellen's older sister Catherine, who died in 1984 at the age of twenty-eight, in the small ICU at the children's hospital in Boston. She has read the Connecticut Bar Foundation citation Mary Ellen received in 2011 for thirty years of pro-bono work on adoption law. She has read the alumnae magazine note from 1978 announcing Mary Ellen's clerkship for Judge Hartwell in Hartford. She has, with great care, read everything she can read in the public record about a woman the college has not had a real conversation with since the spring of 1976.

The call is twelve minutes. It is not an ask. Helen says, Mary Ellen, I'm Helen from the college, I'm calling because the fiftieth is in May and I wanted to be in touch before the noise of it starts. I'm not calling to sell you anything. I'm calling because I've been reading your file and I noticed your sister Catherine. I'd like, when you come up in May, if you're willing, to walk you over to the Garrison reading room and show you something we've been thinking about. There's no rush. There's nothing in the mail. Would it be all right if I checked back in February?

The call ends. Mary Ellen, in West Hartford, does not put the phone down for a long moment. She finishes the tea, which has gone cold. She does open the cream envelope. She does, on a Monday morning, mail in the registration with a personal check and a small note that says Helen — looking forward to May. Please tell Carol Reardon I'm coming.

The bequest paragraph in the March trust amendment, which had been written in pencil with a blank where the beneficiary's name was meant to go, is filled in, in ink, in the second week of June.

The amendment is filed before the reunion.

The call that was missing

Helen's call is, in every small college's advancement shop, the call somebody has been meaning to make.

She has been meaning to make it for a long time. She has not made it because the reunion class for 2027 has three hundred and four names on it, and to make a Helen-quality call to each one she would need to read, in the public record, the obituary of every alumna's sister, the citation in every alumna's professional life, the husband's company sale in 2014, the daughter's graduation from Tufts in 2019, the small mention in the Hartford Courant in 2022 of the adoption-law clinic Mary Ellen quietly co-founded. Three hundred and four files, two hours each, in an office of four people who are also doing the fall annual fund.

The math doesn't fit inside the year. So Helen does not make the call. The eleven logistical touches go out. The reunion brunch sells out. Two hundred and forty women come back for a weekend in May. About sixty of them, in private, were waiting for a call in October from a person at the college who had read their file with the kind of attention their husband's estate attorney brings to the same paperwork.

About sixty of them, by the following March, file an amendment that does not include the college.

The amendment is not in the donor file. The college does not, in 2027 or 2034 or 2041, know it did not happen. The next time the college finds out is at a wake.

A small honest note about Rōmy

Rōmy does not make Helen's twelve-minute call. Helen does. She has to. The call is the entire point. The reading-room reference, the I noticed your sister Catherine, the choice to mention Carol Reardon by name — none of that comes out of a tool. It comes out of a fifty-four-year-old woman in Northampton who once buried her own sister at thirty-one and knows what it costs to mention one.

What a tool can do is collapse the reading.

The two hours of reading per alumna — the obituaries, the bar foundation citations, the clerkship notes, the Town Topics mentions, the husband's small Connecticut River valley software exit in 2014, the daughter's wedding in Vermont in 2021, the small co-founded clinic in the Courant — that is, almost all of it, in the public record. It is in newspaper archives. It is in the college's own back issues. It is in the bar association's annual directories. It is in the public obituary indexes of three New England states.

What we want a research tool to do, on a Tuesday afternoon in late September, is hand Helen — in two pages per alumna, hyperlinked — the careful small portrait of the woman she is about to call, in time for the call to actually go out in October.

The tool does not write the second sentence of the call. Helen writes the second sentence of the call. The tool makes sure that when Helen sits down on a Tuesday afternoon to make sixty calls in eight weeks, the sixty files on her desk are already read.

The compression is the difference between the call happening sixty times and the call happening twice.

A small assignment, with love ♡

If you are in an advancement shop with a reunion class on the calendar this academic year — and most of you are, somewhere — try this on a Monday afternoon.

Pull the reunion class roster. Sort by reunion year, oldest first. The fiftieth class is the one. Past the fiftieth, the twenty-fifth, then the fortieth.

Take a printed copy of the fiftieth-reunion roster home for the weekend. Sit with it on Sunday morning with coffee. Cross out, with a soft pencil, the names that have already had a real conversation with the college in the last two years. Cross out, gently, the names whose files indicate clearly they would not welcome a call.

Look at the names that are left.

These are the women, and men, who in October are sitting on a bench in a quiet bedroom in a small house in a small town in a state nobody at the college has been to in twenty years, holding a cream envelope and a cup of cold tea, deciding whether the place that taught them at eighteen has earned a paragraph in a trust amendment at sixty-eight.

The decision is being made right now. It will be made by May whether you call or not.

Pick five. Read the public record. Make the October call.

The reunion is the moment. The brunch is the cover. The bench is the room. ♡