By Ella Harvey
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Especially when the Advancement office asks you to help recreate some old Lovett photos, which is what I did a few weeks ago as part of Alumni Giving Day.
Lucy Lina is another Riverbank Guide who took part in the event. “I love how it was one of my responsibilities because it is one of my favorite things I take part in on campus,” she said. Riverbank Guides lead tours around campus for prospective families and occasionally engage with alumni.
On Alumni Giving Day, Lovett alumni are kindly asked to donate to support Lovett’s future. All of the donations are contributing to Lovett’s annual True Blue Fund. According to Mrs. Olaya, the assistant director of annual giving, the True Blue Fund is “Lovett’s unrestricted Annual Giving campaign. So the annual fund offsets the budget. Tuition covers only a certain amount of the annual operating budget, so the True Blue Fund makes up the rest.”
Mrs. Olaya has been here since January of 2025, and before this, she was at another school, where she was “doing advancement and marketing and communications, which I was running someone else’s social media, which is where my ideas come from.” This includes the photo recreation project.
One day, the Engagement Office was looking at a photo of students in the ‘70s walking up the stairs to the ARC, and Mrs. Olaya thought, “How cool would it be if we created that with current students now?”
She asked Riverbank Guides to recreate the photos because they also interact with alumni. “I got about 10 Riverbank guides to agree,” Mrs. Olaya said. Over the course of a couple of days, she recreated a ton of photos and then incorporated them into a short video, which was uploaded to the Lovett Alumni Instagram.
“I was very excited when I got the email to recreate the pictures from alumni giving day,” Lucy said.
This intersection of past and present coincided with the theme of this year’s Alumni Giving Day, “Honor, Give, Impact.”
“It’s honoring the places and spaces that built you,” Mrs. Olaya said. This year was even bigger than previous years because it was the last Alumni Giving Day before construction on the new Rita Anne Rollins Hall begins.
“We wanted to honor specifically the community center, and all the spaces and places on campus that meant something to alumni,” Mrs. Olaya said. This is where the recreating photos idea came to mind.
Lucy valued the opportunity to explore Lovett’s past. “It was fun to get to walk around campus and see how it has changed over time,” she said.
Still, Mrs. Olaya understands that the demolition and construction will evoke mixed feelings among alumni. “Especially for our older alumni, this was their high school, or it was their middle school,” she explained.
Alumni are not the only ones who are asked to donate to the True Blue Fund. Parents, grandparents, friends of the community, parents of alumni, and faculty are often asked to donate.
She pointed out that they solicit from these other groups more than alumni “because many recent alumni are young and in college, and might not want to be solicited by their alma mater regularly (it is just my guess, though).”
Ultimately, Mrs. Olaya hopes older alumni will enjoy the new changes at Lovett and, hopefully, embrace the future Lovett generations.
