Campus Community is an innovative platform designed and managed by a dynamic team of professionals representing all aspects of higher education, including public and private universities, private colleges, and community and technical colleges. Our team consists of higher education professionals who collectively have extensive experience in enrollment management, student learning and engagement, international education, and EdTech.

Campus Community was launched in January 2022, a time when mutual understanding between peoples around the world couldn’t be more important.  Our team is committed to the global power of education to bring people together in the pursuit of shared understanding and common purpose.  Our foundation rests on the principles of inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility. 

Welcome to the community!

At Campus Community, our mission is to assist higher education institutions with boosting meaningful community engagement and support among prospective, admitted and enrolled students, and thereby increase student recruitment, retention and engagement.

At Campus Community, we believe connected and engaged communities are the foundation of a strong education institution. By leveraging innovative technologies and emerging modalities for student learning and engagement, institutions can build and nurture connections that empower vibrant communities.

Campus Community was created by Christian Alyea, who is also the co-founder and chief innovation officer of Study Abroad Association. Christian led the development of Campus Community as a reimagining of what's possible with campus engagement in higher education and how emerging technology can be leveraged to connect students and campus communities in ways we haven’t seen before. 

Christian has been working in international higher education since 2009 and has assisted over 250 institutions with internationalizing their institutions through faculty-directed programming and virtual global learning. Additionally, he has personally directed over one hundred education abroad programs with more than 1,500 diverse students and faculty across six continents. Throughout his career, he’s seized all opportunities to deeply understand the educational challenges that institutions face and collaborate on the development solutions that harness the power of community engagement. 

Christian’s Journey

Throughout Christian's journey, fostering a true sense of community and belonging has been a guiding philosophy.

Christian's journey began in 2000 when he joined the Global Buddy program at his high school in Oklahoma. The program connected visiting Rotary exchange students with local students who would serve as cultural ambassadors and provide friendly peer-to-peer support. This experience led to the creation of meaningful friendships with dozens of international students from across the globe, leaving Christian with the desire to become an exchange student himself!  

Christian was selected as a Rotary exchange student in 2005 and invited to spend one year on exchange in Košice, Slovakia where he would attend high school and live with a local host family. During that year he had the opportunity to learn alongside exchange students from 50 countries in addition to his Slovak host, an experience that has shaped his career and propelled him as a life-long learner. 

In fact, Christian later attended the City University of Seattle in Bratislava, Slovakia where he spent the next four years completing his degree in business administration with students from around the world. 

In 2009, Christian founded Oklahoma Study Abroad, an education abroad organization created to make global education opportunities more accessible. In 2017, he teamed up with his long-time Italian exchange student friends to launch the Study Abroad Association (SAA).