By KATHLEEN MEYERS
Special to College Topics

After more than 20 years of serving Cavalier Daily alumni and staff, the Cavalier Daily Alumni Association has decided it is time for a change.
According to CDAA President Diane Krehmeyer, the change will not be radical: The CDAA’s mission and goals will remain the same. Rather, the organization’s structure will be fine-tuned to reflect the shifting needs of both its alumni membership and the student paper it supports.
“To be successful, every organization needs to change with the times,” Krehmeyer explained. “What worked 20 years ago may not work now.”
Since the CDAA’s 2002 strategic planning meeting, the board has been formulating possible changes to the CDAA’s structure in order to better serve and encourage involvement among the growing number of alumni.
“I think that there was a bit of stagnation that afflicted the CDAA,” CDAA Vice President Lisa Guernsey said. “We didn’t have enough new people who felt that there was a role for them to play. It looked from the outside that we didn’t need help.”
The CDAA is presently headed by a 21-member board of directors —including four officers, four to six committee chairs, the current CD editor-in-chief and 12 ad-hoc members. The restructuring will downsize the board of directors to 13 members.
CDAA membership is open to any alumnus who ever worked for the CD; at present the CDAA counts more than 2,000 members. This inclusive nature has resulted in a wide range of involvement among members.
“Some people are very involved, and others just get the newsletter,” Krehmeyer said. “The most involved people tend to be on the board.” The restructuring will require each board member to actively participate on a committee.
By reorganizing the structure and refocusing the efforts of the board, the organization hopes to strengthen its committees and, as a result, make it easier for alumni to get involved.
“Encouraging involvement by our general membership is very important,” CDAA founder Richard Neel said. “As alumni go out into the world, their priorities shift, and they don’t have a lot of time. Giving the CDAA some small part of their time at whatever level of commitment will help make the organization stronger and more effective in providing support to the newspaper.”
In addition, board members say restructuring is a natural response to the changing needs of both the CDAA and the CD over time and is necessary to best support the CD and the continued well-being of the staff.
“The reason several alumni, including myself, created the Cavalier Daily Alumni Association in the early 1980s was to provide a lasting resource for The Cavalier Daily and to institutionalize alumni support,” Neel said.
During his term as CD editor-in-chief in 1979, Neel drew on the support of CD alumni during a dispute with the University administration over the extent of oversight the University- sponsored media board could exercise over The Cavalier Daily.
“After the dispute was resolved, we thought The Cavalier Daily would be well served by having a permanent organization of alumni who could offer support for the newspaper, as well as emergency support, should it become necessary,” Neel said.
“The structure worked very effectively at the time the CDAA was founded,” Krehmeyer said. “The Cavalier Daily was under such fire from the administration, there was a role for all of the people to play—from lawyers, to journalists and even businesspeople—all of their expertise was needed.”
However, the CD no longer faces the challenges it once did.
“The Cavalier Daily has become much more stable and financially secure and has had far fewer rocky moments in the past decade,” Guernsey said. “The previous model is not as necessary anymore. The safety net doesn’t need to be quite as big.”
Since the type of alumni support needed has changed over the years, the CDAA’s restructuring aims to refocus the organization’s support of The Cavalier Daily rather than discontinue it. As a result, the CDAA board is in the process of reassessing the value of all of the organization’s activities. Functions that do not have active alumni support will be discontinued, at least temporarily.
The CDAA will continue to offer scholarships to members of the CD staff, as well as services such as journalism workshops and financial and business consultation, Krehmeyer said.
According to Krehmeyer, the process of restructuring has met no significant opposition among members of the board, and the reorganization and is moving forward in a spirit of cooperation and hope that the effort will bring greater efficiency and effectiveness to the program.
“Everyone is in pretty full agreement that it is important to re-evaluate where we are as an organization,” Krehmeyer said.
The board is anticipating changes to take full effect by this fall.