As with all great ideas…

The Student Affairs Collective began as a series of doodles on the back of a napkin between Tom Krieglstein & Kevin Prentiss in 2005. The vision was, and still is, to create the ultimate online community of Student Affairs Professionals in which everyone is both a teacher and student at the same time to help each other play, learn and grow together to collectively reach higher levels of success.

In the beginning, Tom and Kevin wrote all the content. They then bribed their student affairs friends with cookies and digital unicorns to help them write more content, and slowly, over time, an engaged community developed. The SA Collective started to become the go-to place online for student affairs professionals to receive and share knowledge from their peers. The growth remained steady, and then Twitter came along…

In 2009, over lunch with Debra Sanborn at an Iowa coffee shop, Tom pitched the idea of a weekly chat via Twitter for student affairs professionals. Debra nodded excitedly at the idea (as she does with all new ideas), and a couple weeks later, on Oct 8th, 2009, the first #SAchat happened with 15 people and 50 tweets.

Since then, the SAC, which is what the cool kids call it, has grown to be a community of thousands of student affairs professionals, stretching international borders and all functional areas of the field. We now have a podcast, a bookstore, a jobs board, a Blogging Network, a Book Club, an SAGrad Scholarship, a weekly newsletter (see below), Tweetups, and the #SAChat Awards. Through it all, the SAC continues to focus on creating  the best peer-to-peer learning network for student affairs professionals.

Now it’s your turn to jump in and be a part of the family and help us create the next ten years of awesomeness. As a bonus, you’ll laugh, smile, create friendships, and grow a positive national reputation for yourself and your work. Then, when you go on to change the world, we’ll get to say you first shared your potential with us by helping fellow Student Affairs Professionals be even more amazing!

“Collectively, connected humans will be capable of things we cannot imagine right now.”

– Kevin Kelly