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Club Profile: ND Spirit in San Francisco

The Notre Dame Club of San Francisco embraces its local identity with a focus on community-driven events. Members enjoy a Dining Diversity series featuring monthly dinners at various ethnic restaurants, fostering networking and cultural exchange. The club also organizes large gatherings like tailgates for football games and winery tours, while implementing new strategies to accommodate busy alumni in the tech industry, including streamlined event planning.

Published: May 15, 2017
Author: Lynn Freehill Maye

These days, the Notre Dame Club of San Francisco's credo might as well be be "go local."

Since its members are situated 2,200 miles from campus, the group capitalizes on the Bay Area's strengths to provide unique, only-in-NoCal events for its members.

Take its Dining Diversity series. San Francisco is known for hosting immigrants — and their corresponding cuisines — from all over. The local Notre Dame club recently revived its program of holding monthly dinners at varied ethnic restaurants, from Filipino to Brazilian. Alumni gather for networking and make a point to invite guests with in-country experience. The participants both try new dishes and learn about a different place.

Other uniquely Bay Area offerings provide opportunities, too. For the annual Stanford-Notre Dame football game, the club teams up with its counterparts in Chico, San Jose, Sacramento and the San Joaquin Valley to sell some 2,000 tickets and host a massive tailgate. With their Napa Valley proximity, the San Francisco and Sacramento clubs have also co-hosted winery bus tours for both young and older alumni, visiting alumni-owned vineyards.

Because its members are exceptionally busy (an estimated 30 percent of them working in the tech industry), the club recently prototyped ways to streamline event organizing, President Jack Moore (ND '14) says. At the start of the year, it officially enacted an eight-member core board. Any volunteer who wants to plan an event can work with one of two senior board members to do so without having to commit to monthly meetings. During May's Hesburgh Month of Service, for instance, an alumnus is organizing a Rebuilding Together Oakland event.

"I think that our club has done a good job of putting systems in place that cater to folks who are otherwise really busy, but want to make sure Our Lady's University is still part of their lives," Moore says. "It's always interesting to see what you get when you pair everything the Bay stands for with everything Notre Dame stands for."