Our Mission: Yale International Alliance connects Yale alumni around the world to learn from one another, build meaningful relationships, and create positive impact across communities.

The Origin Story of YIA
Renata Cesar

I started the Yale International Alliance in 2011 because, back then, international
Yale alums felt very disconnected from their alma mater. Email had still not entirely
replaced snail mail, and social media and smart phones were novelties. Yalies
outside the US often felt that people in the US did not give the rest of the world as
much thought as they would have liked. Many countries did not have their own Yale
clubs, and there was no way for alums in a country to reach out to each other.
International alums from the many parts of the world without an emotive US alumni
tradition didn’t even know what they were missing.

I imagined what a network of Yale alums around the world could accomplish—the
possibilities seemed endless. I felt that they were uniquely placed to promote global
citizenship by giving back to Yale and Yale students through their perspectives,
knowledge and networks. I formed and chaired the YIA Working Group of eight
alumni volunteers, with Nicholas Lewis as our inspiring YAA liaison.

We persuaded the YAA to sponsor a kick-off event in London in May 2012: ‘The
Global Citizen Symposium.’ Yale World Fellow Marvin Rees spoke on ‘Thinking
Globally While Acting Locally,’ a panel of alums discussed ‘What Does it Mean to be
a Global Citizen?’, and we finished with an hour for our international alums
to socialise. We had 80+ attendees, and no one wanted to leave at the end. Many
alums told me how energising it was to meet, for the first time, other people with
similar stories of being born in one country, growing up in another, going to college in
a third, living and working in a fourth, etc.

Global citizens created the YIA Shared Interest Group in that hour. Finally, we had to
turn off the lights to get people to go home.

The event brought more volunteers into the Working Group. By July, we had set up
YIA social media, reached out to campus groups and international Yale clubs,
surveyed the then 13K international Yale alumni, and found Anant Jani, the alum
who would start work on our first YIA website and become our invaluable
communications director.

Time zones were an even bigger problem for YIA than they are now! I ran
introductory conference calls for Yale alums in different time zones, and one
challenge was convincing the YAA to organise a way for international alums to join
without having to pay international calling charges (remember this was 2012/13—
Intercall, Shindig and FreeConferenceCall were among the imperfect predecessors
to Zoom).

We explored the technology for an online alumni network and virtual conferencing,
and Anant and I had started the first YIA Virtual Lecture Series (hard to believe now,
but virtual lectures were something novel in those days!)

Further virtual lecture series came from South Korea, England, the US and Latin
America. Alums spoke on topics like European healthcare, Mexican urban planning,
working for Medecins Sans Frontieres, and transcultural journeys in art history. As
pioneers of the technology, we occasionally lost a speaker mid-sentence, or they
forgot to press ‘record’ before starting, but the kinks began to be worked out.

We engaged in additional in-person events like ‘The Global Citizen: Dubai,’ a launch
mixer for the Yale Club of Ghana Conference, and the annual YIA breakfast for
international alums at the Yale Alumni Assembly. Especially dynamic was a panel in
New Haven for students interested in working abroad: ‘Global Citizens: Life Skills’
(the students’ intense questions were fielded by an anti-corruption advocate from
Greece, a public health expert from the UK, an alum working on the Ebola crisis for
WHO, a war crimes prosecutor at The Hague, and an American alum teaching high
school in Jordan).

Popular as the virtual lectures were, the launch and the in-person events–with their
intense conversations–remained particularly memorable. Later, when Covid erupted,
I would turn those memories into the idea of YIA Common Rooms, where alums
(although they had to be on Zoom) took center stage.

By 2018, the YAA felt that we had reached the point where our working group could
become a full board. We held a retreat in New York City which led to our inaugural
board (first meeting in January 2019) of alums George Abdelnour, Maria Lopez-
Bresnahan, Caroline Van, Kyle Wang, Nicholas Lewis (ex-officio) and myself. And
we started the next phase of YIA’s life.