When we first introduced readers to Amelia Wald (Col ’19), it was February 2020 and she was eight months into a two-year term as the executive director of the Virginia Club of New York.

With scholarship support, Wald had graduated from the University debt-free. She chose the Virginia Club position over law school, the cost of which was beginning to weigh on her.

As executive director, Wald worked from her office in the club’s headquarters at the Yale Club of New York, coordinating between the club’s members, its 25-member volunteer board, and colleagues on Grounds. She planned alumni events, including the popular holiday party.

Amelia Wald celebrates with fellow Virginia Club of New York board members Joshua Greyson Holmes (Col ’01) and Dylan Fogarty (Col ’15, McIntire ’16) at the Virginia Club of New York’s 2021 holiday party, the first after COVID closures.

Many New Yorkers left the city during the pandemic, but when we checked on Wald in May 2020, she was still there. From her apartment in the East Village, she developed a robust series of virtual programming that connected Virginia Club members in new ways. She volunteered for the Meatloaf Kitchen and Pantry soup kitchen on Saturdays to provide structure to her weeks and sense of purpose in her community.

When her term ended, Wald had organized over over 100 virtual events, and Virginia Club members were beginning to gather in-person again. The soup kitchen is still a part of Wald’s routine. She and her fellow volunteers served meals to go during the pandemic, but now guests can dine together. “An ethos of the soup kitchen is the idea that you want to treat every single person as you would want to be treated, to serve them as you would want to be served,” she said. “And one of the really fundamental human aspects of a good meal is being able to sit down, take a breath, and have that mentally rejuvenating experience in addition to physical nourishment.”

“To be in a customer success role and also be part of the product organization is giving me so many opportunities to learn new skills,” she said. “I am the voice of the customer in those contexts and advocate for their needs directly to the product team. It’s incredibly empowering to know that conversations that I have with clients, and evidence I collect from their experiences, could be directly translated into product development and product updates.”

Wald’s fifth reunion is this spring, and she is co-chair of the Class of 2019’s giving committee with Truman Brody-Boyd (Col ’19). She has designated her reunion gift to the College of Arts & Sciences. “My education gave me this great foundation for a wonderful career. But I still look back at the personal lessons I learned from the professors and from the graduate students in those departments and in those classes. I will always have immense gratitude for the care and the thought and the intentionality that they put into a holistic education,” she said. “They taught me to think—to approach the world in a thoughtful way—which has had a huge impact on the person I am and on the way I operate in the world. It’s definitely a joy to give back.”