"Dear Earlhamite,

Several weeks ago, in light of Earlham's leadership transition, budget strictures, enrollment shortfalls, administrative churn and Board of Trustees controversy, the College invited Alumni Council to address the alumni body. Council urged that the Board of Trustees and College itself must first respond to the call for transparency and communicate directly with the College's constituencies, addressing the concerns that have been shared from private conversations and in social media. While there are a range of opinions on those messages, both the Board and College have spoken out, and now Council steps up to do the same.

Alumni Council is an all-volunteer advisory body, guided by "The Constitution of the Earlham College Alumni Association." Council's constitutional purpose is to facilitate the relationships of alumni with each other, the College, and current students. As such, our work includes efforts centered on student mentoring, alumni outreach and supporting student faculty research. As your representatives to the College, Council is deeply attentive to current events and in regular communication with the College's administration and Board. It is Council's goal to work as a team, with you and with them, to ensure Earlham's success in the future and advance the interests of the College. We will gather for our Fall meeting over Homecoming and Reunion Weekend and our full attention will be directed to these issues.

Redress of flaws is welcomed and should be directed to the College and the Board for attention and action. Earlham as an institution is administered and governed by imperfect persons and achieves its ends imperfectly, but there is a difference between tough times such as these, which disappoint individuals, and failing at a mission. An Earlham education continues to successfully apply the pursuit of truth, a respect for conscience, and rigor to improving our world. This is the Earlham experience – that lived and shared experience of teaching, learning, and seeking that at its finest unleashes our moral and intellectual agency in the world and bonds us as alumni to each other, to the College and to the students who have come after us.

Very recently, the Summer 2018 issue of the Earlhamite was published. A close reading of its contents shows how many good things are happening at the College that we can and should support. As Council, we appeal to our Earlham alumni community to return a measure of focus to this Earlham, obscured from view in recent weeks. It is the heart of us all and is at the core of Alumni Council's mission. We hear and acknowledge your fears, which are also ours, that this very essence of Earlham may be vulnerable under a drastic budget reduction. We are working together with all alumni, staff, other stakeholders and people of goodwill to protect against this outcome.

So many of you have asked how you may engage. Alumni Council has a responsibility to help you engage meaningfully. There are many ways to be in an active relationship with each other as alumni, with the College, and its students. Some of these include:
• Nominating Alumni Council and AAAB members
• Making a financial gift to the College
• Volunteering with admissions
• Recommending a student to Earlham
• Serving as a class chair or on your reunion committee
• Connecting with students through our LinkedIn group
• Sharing an internship, job or research opportunity at your workplace
• Offering housing for students in your area
• Organizing an alumni event in your area
• Nominating a peer for an alumni award or the Athletics Hall of Fame
• Helping with on-campus activities
Alumni Council can help direct you; please reach out to us with any questions or concerns about engagement at acleaders@earlham.edu. To express your commitment to one of these volunteer opportunities, email alums@earlham.edu.

We ask your attention, energy and support on behalf of the students, faculty and staff at Earlham at the outset of a year of unwelcome change. To that end, the Alumni Council leaves you with this vignette. In the summer Earlhamite, in a story about the Earlham School of Religion, Eva Abbott discusses her ministry's vulnerable clients and her feelings of hopelessness – which some of us, too, may have felt listening to the dire speculations and scenarios about Earlham at this moment in time. A supervisor challenged Abbott's hopelessness and invited her instead to feel and participate in the hope of the people she served. She recounts, "[T]hey were asking me to find a way to join them in their hope." This friend speaks our mind.

Sincerely,

Martha Henn `84, Alumni Council Chair
On behalf of the Alumni Council"