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We started ours in 2022 with one meeting and no plan. It now has more than 600 registered members and runs twenty-odd events a year. This is the sequence that worked, and the things we got wrong along the way.
Most advice on starting an alumni association is written by people selling software to universities. It describes committees, charters and engagement strategies. That advice is not wrong, but it assumes an institution with staff and a budget.
What follows is different: an account of how the alumni association of Christ The King Inter College, Tundla was actually built, by former students with day jobs, in a small town in Uttar Pradesh. The examples are all real events we ran. Take what applies.
The temptation is to draft rules first. We did the opposite, and it was the right call: in October 2022 a group of former students simply organised a meet in Tundla. No bylaws, no committee, no membership fee — just an evening for people who had not seen each other in years.
What that gathering produced was a list of people who cared enough to turn up. That list, not a document, is what an association is built on. If you cannot fill a room once, formal structure will not save you.
Our first Annual General Body Meeting came in July 2023 — roughly nine months after that first meet, and only because there were then decisions worth minuting: who holds funds, who speaks for the association, how events get approved.
Office bearers, a written aim, and a record of meetings matter enormously once money and the school's name are involved. They matter very little before that. Formalising early tends to produce an association that exists on paper and nowhere else.
Reunions bring the same forty people back each year. Service work brings new ones. Our 2023 calendar was an eye and dental camp, a career counselling session on law and human rights, and a cyber-safety seminar for current students — all of which gave alumni something to contribute rather than merely attend.
By 2024 that had grown into a free health camp, a visit to Ganesh Kusht Ashram, and a water camp at Tundla Junction. The alumni who show up for those are frequently not the ones who show up for dinners, and an association needs both.
Most alumni of any school do not stay in the town. Ours are spread across Delhi NCR and well beyond, and for two years the association was effectively invisible to them.
The first Delhi NCR Alumni Meet in December 2024 fixed that, and it is the single change that most widened participation. A chapter needs no formal structure — one person willing to book a venue in the city where a cluster of alumni already live is enough.
For the first two years, contact details lived in WhatsApp groups and one committee member's phone. That works until the person holding the list is unavailable, or until you want to reach everyone from a particular batch rather than everyone at once.
A searchable directory — batch year, profession, city — turns a contact list into something alumni actually use. Ours now holds more than 600 registered members, and it is the reason a request for help with a career session can reach the right twenty people instead of all of them.
Rang Barse, our Holi meet, has run since 2023. Nobody debates whether it is happening; the only question each year is where. That predictability does more for continuity than any amount of planning.
An annual fixture gives lapsed members an obvious moment to return, gives the committee a deadline, and gives the association a rhythm that survives changes in who is running it.
An alumni association is an organised body of a school or college's former students, formed to keep them connected to one another and to the institution. In practice that means three things: a way to find each other, a reason to gather, and some contribution back to the school — mentoring, funding, or simply turning up.
It does not require registration, a bank account or a constitution to begin. Ours had none of those for its first year. It required about a dozen people willing to organise one evening.
Written by the Christ The King Alumni Association, Tundla, Uttar Pradesh. If you are starting an association at your own school and want to ask about any of this, get in touch — we would rather answer than have you repeat our mistakes.