Harvard Club of Chicago

Welcome to the Harvard Club of Chicago (HCC) website.

The HCC is the oldest continually operating Harvard Alumni Club in the world (proudly dating to 1857) and has more than l,000 active members. This site is intended to keep visitors and members informed about Harvard, about our varied Club activities, and to facilitate your engagement and heighten our Club experience.

Our mission is to foster a strong and welcoming community of local Harvard University alumni through engaging programs and events; to serve the interests of Harvard in the Chicago region; to promote Harvard's values of service, education, and leadership; and, to provide alumni with opportunities to serve Harvard and benefit our local community.

The Club interviews every student applying to Harvard College from the Chicago area. Last year our Schools Committee members working closely with the Admissions Office in Cambridge conducted in-person interviews of approximately 1,300 local applicants to the Class of 2024. The Committee and its local secondary school liaison continually seek to identify the most accomplished and promising local students and encourage them to consider Harvard and honor us with an application for admission.

Each fall Harvard volunteers have participated in an Early College Awareness program at area high schools. The ECA program, an event that the HCC has organized annually for many years, is designed to deliver an impactful message with information and resources to underprivileged middle and high school students and their families that a college education is an attainable goal for them; however, it requires careful planning, discipline and knowledge of available financial and other assistance.

The Club also features engaging programs and events. We regularly feature speakers from the Harvard and Chicago academic, civic and business communities, offer our members exclusive invitations to arts and Chicago sporting events, family outings, as well as holding a few purely social get togethers. While the current Covid-19 situation will require us to hold many of these events online for the near term, our programs consistently provide an excellent opportunity to gather with friends, classmates and others from the Harvard community here in Chicago.

To support these and other activities, the Club depends upon the hands-on support of its members. We offer several other volunteer opportunities for alumni (and in some cases, non-alumni as well) to become involved. These are posted on our site, and I encourage you to find activities of interest, inquire of Board members and others and volunteer to help out. If you have ideas for additional activities, interesting program events, prospective Club members or for anything else, please let us know.

We appreciate your interest in our site and welcome you to be an active member of the Harvard Club of Chicago. The Club offers an enjoyable vehicle by which to reconnect with and see classmates and old friends, meet new ones and continue the dialogue of mutual interests that you began in the Yard and at its graduate schools.

Sincerely,

Charles S Bergen, AB ’77 JD ‘81

President