Best of CASE District VII Award
 

Institution: University of California, Davis

Title of entry: New Family Welcomes

About this entry: How do you welcome your new parents and family members in a pandemic when your university isn’t hosting in person events? You take to zoom! In summer of 2021 we hosted a series of celebratory and casual gatherings, intended to bring together incoming parents and family members from similar regions to meet each other and ask questions. We solicited incoming student data from Undergraduate Admissions to select our virtual regional welcomes, hosting welcomes in the most populous regions: South Bay Area, San Francisco/Marin, East Bay Area, Greater Sacramento Region, Southern California, Out-Of-State, China, and India. For each event, the program consisted of: a welcome from university staff, advice from current parents and/or Alumni, an open forum to ask questions in the large group format, and concluded with breakout rooms so that parents could meet each other. We engaged 335 parents and family members over the course of these events which was on par with the level of engagement in these regions we saw in 2019, the last year we hosted these events which were in person at the time. We rebranded these events from Student Send Offs to New Family Welcomes in order to make it more clear that the intention of these events was to engage our parents rather than to engage students, leaving that work to our colleagues in Orientation. We intend to keep this rebrand for future years and will host at least one virtual new family welcome so we can reach as many families as possible.