Creating An Alumni Community
Rosemary Jackson ’84 is the architect of Vanguard University’s alumni association and spent decades traveling the country to meet with alums and reconnect them to each other and to their alma mater. During her twenty-four years as alumni director she created an alumni newsletter, held the school’s first homecoming, published an extensive alumni directory and built a strong sense of community among VU alums.
“I always reasoned that if someone went to a school and gave a year or more of their life there, they wanted to be reminded of that good experience,” she says. “It just took someone to bring people together.”
Jackson was born and raised in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, where she showed an early talent for organizing groups of people. At 16, she created a successful Friday night children’s church at the storied Elim Tabernacle Assembly church. During summers she directed the children’s program at camp and traveled widely to conduct vacation Bible schools.
She and husband Keith Wright came to Pasadena in 1959 so he could attend Fuller Seminary. But at the end of their second year there, he died suddenly of cancer.
“I can’t tell you what I went through when my husband died. I was devastated,” Jackson says. “I was so in love with Keith.”
She was faced with a choice: return to Canada with her two-year-old son and raise him near family, or remain in Pasadena where she had made many friends and felt at home. Keith’s last words to her helped her decide.
“The night before he died, I said to my husband, ‘What will I do if anything ever happens to you?’” she says. “He said just three words: ‘Don’t move hastily.’”
With that in mind, Rosemary chose to stay and continue working for the Assemblies of God southern California district office, where she met O. Cope Budge. She then left to work at Fuller Theological Seminary, but Budge called in 1965 and asked her to be his secretary at Vanguard, where he was then president.
“I thought, that’s what I want to do for the rest of my life: work in a college that is Assemblies of God-related,” she says. “I felt it would be my next move and my final move.” She took the job and “was in my glory.”
A year later she met John Jackson ’44, who moved out from Springfield, Missouri, to court and marry her.
She served as secretary for three VU presidents, at each of their request, and on Labor Day weekend 1979, president Wayne Kraiss offered her an opportunity which would re-define her career. The school had received a grant from the federal government to establish an alumni office and hire an alumni director. Though Vanguard was sixty years old, it had nothing in the way of an alumni association. Kraiss felt that Jackson was the person for the job. Jackson took the job — and cried for a month.
With John’s encouragement, Rosemary started with nothing but a list of 1,479 alumni names and addresses provided by the school, and many of those were outdated. With the help of student-workers and many alumni volunteers she began hunting down as many alumni as possible. There was immediate interest from alums, especially when she started a quarterly alumni newsletter to keep them in touch with each other and with the University.
“It caught fire because everybody is interested in reading about their classmates,” she says.
Alumni membership and giving grew steadily. Soon the Jacksons hit the road, traveling the west coast in a little trailer to start chapter meetings. They met with alumni in homes, churches and restaurants, and slept in the trailer in church parking lots. Then they expanded into the Midwest.
She organized the school’s first annual homecoming in 1981, and held class reunions, special all-family events and fundraising banquets. All the effort paid off as people began to coalesce into a community.
“When alumni come back to campus, attend a class reunion or go to a chapter meeting, they pick up where they left off as students,” says Jackson.
But she had some unfinished business to take care of as well. “I grew up in such poverty that I wasn’t able to get a college education,” she says. “The best I thought I could do was work at a college and help others get their education.”
But she began taking a class or two at Vanguard each semester until finally, in 1984, she graduated with her bachelor’s degree in business administration with a 3.84 GPA. She was later named the 2001 Alumnus of the Year.
Later, in 2002, the alumni community she had helped to create became a critical support for her when John died suddenly of pancreatic cancer.
In 2003, Jackson was named special assistant to the president for alumni relations. She retired in 2007 and married retired army chaplain John (Jack) Torp that same year. The two continue to travel and visit alumni across America.
“I’ve had a wonderful life, and Vanguard has been the best,” she says. “I was on cloud nine the whole time I worked at Vanguard. I wanted to go to work every day. The alumni have become my dear, dear friends, hundreds of them. Even the two years I’ve been traveling with Jack all across the country, I call alumni everywhere I stop. You name a city and I can tell you who is there.”