With Alumni Toolkit, every high school can mobilize and engage alumni to provide the college role models, career and STEM partners, social and emotional advocates, and project learning supporters that inspire and motivate students to reach higher: in high school and beyond.
Why Alumni Toolkit?
Relatable, diverse, alumni role models can motivate students and improve engagement.
Near-peer college-going alumni can support, inspire, and inform your college readiness programs.
Alumni community partners can provide student opportunities - like jobs, internship and mentors.
Associate Principal at New Britain High School
Who We Are:
Alumni Toolkit, an initiative of Big Picture Learning, is a nonprofit whose mission is to help high schools engage and mobilize their alumni so every student has the support, inspiration, and opportunities they need to graduate motivated and prepared for college and/or career success.
Read our feature in Principal Leadership magazine.
Alumni Toolkit is an alumni engagement platform that makes it easy, effective and rewarding for educators to utilize alumni as motivating and informative voices that inspire student success.
Designed to meet the needs of understaffed high schools and busy educators.
Provides empowering role models and partners that reflect the diversity of your students.
Demonstrates the college/career pathways from your school.
Supports existing program activities and student needs and flexible to match your strategic goals and student outcomes.
Made strictly as a resource for educators - not a social network for students.
Informed by research.
Alumni Toolkit makes it easy and rewarding to invite alumni back and inspire, inform, and introduce your students to their future opportunities.
Every student deserves to be inspired and excited about their future. However, for too many students, graduation feels more like an end instead of a beginning.
Alumni reflect the diversity of your students. They know your community, walked the same hallways as your students, and now they’re in college and careers - ready to share a powerful message:
Recent grads are near-peer college advocates and volunteers who spark inspiration and facilitate action. They not only share about the college process and their success stories, but also offer the strategies to how your students can achieve it too.
Alumni in the prime of their careers are the authentic and diverse role models and mentors that show your students what’s possible. They can provide the inspiration, information, and introductions that students and programs need.
Early career alumni can share their experiences about entering today’s workplace. Preparing for today’s economy requires a fresh outlook on job searches and expectations. They can help students prepare for interviews, internships, and job offers .
More established alumni might not be as relatable to students, but they can provide your programs with the community advocates, business partnerships and internship opportunities to support your programs.
Here’s what researchers from the University of California San Diego’s CREATE and Yankelovich Center found in their review of Alumni Toolkit “The Educational Value of Alumni for Public High Schools”
reported that they gained practical knowledge from alumni events and found them motivating as well.
and schools anticipated using alumni more in the future.
said they would come back for more events if/when they were invited.
