Sunny Breed takes the helm of TUAA

The first president in the history of the TUAA to hail from west of Washington, DC, Sunny Breed, J66, G72, will focus on involving younger alumni and strengthening connections to alumni worldwide.

August 14, 2006--In 1979, Alison (Sunny) Moran Breed, J66, G72, left her job at Tufts for the Alaskan island community of Ketchikan. She worked for the regional airline she and her husband owned and served as president of the Tongass-Alaska Girl Scout Council.

Ketchikan had a movie theater, a hospital, a library, and 13,000 people. It had 13 feet of precipitation each year, almost all of it rain.  It had the long winter nights and long summer days of the northern latitudes.

One thing it didn’t have was a single other Tufts graduate.

“That stint in Alaska helped me value my connections with Tufts even more,” says Breed, “because in Ketchikan there weren’t any connections to the university.” She plans to emphasize initiatives to keep other far-flung alumni connected. “That’s the challenge—to keep people connected to Tufts when they live far away,” says Breed, the first president in the history of TUAA to hail from west of Washington DC.

A vice-president of a Los Angeles firm that provides temporary executives to nonprofit agencies, she is acutely aware of how Tufts’ regional chapters, now more than 50 around the world, illustrate the growing alumni network. “By increasing the activities of chapters around the country and the world,” she says, “we can offer more opportunities for alumni to stay involved."

Breed’s ties to Tufts have remained intact for four decades. Graduating in 1966 with a degree in sociology, she stayed on for 13 years as assistant director of undergraduate admissions. On the job, she earned a master’s in education. She has been a member of the Alumni Council, the governing body of TUAA, since 1972.

She is a third-generation graduate whose grandfather, Wilfred Ringer, a professor in the Tufts education department, graduated with the Class of 1908 and received an honorary degree in 1951. Her mother, Beth Ringer Moran, graduated in 1932 from Jackson College. Breed’s two uncles, her father’s sister and her husband, and two cousins also graduated from Tufts.

As the alumni association's top officer, Breed has two main goals. One is to involve more young alumni in the association. “They are the future of the organization,” she says. “As the previous and current leaders choose to step back, the young alumni are our future leaders." The other is to connect with alumni, no matter where they live. Many decades ago, when Tufts was more of a regional university, keeping in touch with distant alumni wasn’t much of a problem. Today, it’s a given that the alumni family circles the globe.

These and other initiatives will require involvement from a lot of alumni, she says. “It’s a team effort. It’s not a job that anybody can do alone. The organization has 16 committees to get things done. As the president, I’m just one person. Everybody has to be involved to make it work effectively.  The alumni association succeeds because a lot of terrific volunteers give time and talent to make it work.”