San Francisco
Alumni Club of San Francisco/Bay Area

The Kellogg Alumni Club of the San Francisco Bay Area has expanded its leadership team, creating a number of affinity/industry groups to enable alumni with specific interests to network and learn from each other. The affinity/industry groups include Community Affairs, Career Strategy, Social Media, Marketing, Social Impact, Technology, Clean Technology and Energy, Student Relations, Sustainability, Life Science, Wine and Women Alumnae of the Bay Area.

With this larger board, the club has been able to coordinate 20 events in the last quarter of last year. These events have ranged from formal gatherings with well-known speakers to smaller meet-ups. These events included the sold-out Nov. 19 "Marketing Your Product/Service through Social Media," which featured a panel of Bay Area social media experts including Jeremiah Owyang, and was moderated by Tom Bedecarre ’81, CEO at AKQA. Another event was the "Feminine Super Power of Pause" featuring Christine Arylo ’03, author of Madly In Love with Me.

The club also partnered with Northwestern’s other professional schools on events that included the McCormick School of Engineering‘s Centennial Celebration at San Francisco’s De Young Museum. About 170 Kellogg and Northwestern alumni heard from Interim Dean Sunil Chopra and also participated in a special viewing of the "Tutankhamen and The Golden Age of the Pharaohs" exhibit.

The San Francisco Bay Area Kellogg Social Impact and Sustainability Group met at the Mission SF Credit Union in preparation for a learning event at IDEO in February, where alumni used their strategic marketing skills to help an alum’s organization in its mission to reduce poverty. The group holds bimonthly learning events where alumni build knowledge and experience in sustainability and social impact.

 In January, a diverse group of about 15 Kellogg alumni also met to work through an environmental design case study of a Hewlett-Packard laptop that was packaged in a courier bag instead of a box. Uri Kogan ’08, HP sustainable supply chain program manager, led the group through a discussion of the environmental, supply chain, and marketing design constraints involved in HP’s design process. The group also proposed novel approaches to make laptop packaging even more environmental and appealing to consumers in the future. E-mail Patrick McNamara ’86 at McNamara@reospartners.com for future learning, social impact and sustainability group events.

Over the course of the next quarter, the club plans to host events featuring well-known Kellogg alumni Jason Spero ’99, vice president and general manager for North America at AbMob, Andrew Friendly ’00, principal at Advanced Technology