Ifland Offers New Voice to Trustees
Westmont alumnus Rick Ifland has joined the board of trustees, which oversees the operations of the college. He has worked as a successful private equity investor and entrepreneur for the past two decades.
“I am thrilled to work closely with a campus that’s filled with tomorrow’s leaders and to help create an optimal environment where they can learn deeply,” Ifland says.
Recent events, including the unanimous approval of the college’s Master Plan, a $75 million gift and the arrival of new President Gayle Beebe, have created one of the most exciting times in Westmont’s 70-year history, Ifland says.
“Westmont has the opportunity to do something that Oxford, Harvard and Yale Universities originally intended but could not do: integrate academic rigor with a deep Christian faith,” he says. “Each of those fine institutions attempted this and failed. Unable to integrate the two, they chose academia over their Christian heritage. Westmont is perhaps in the best position of any institution in the world to demonstrate that deep faith and top scholarship are not mutually exclusive and can be married in an enormously positive way.”
Ifland graduated from Westmont with a degree in economics and business in 1983, earned an M.B.A. from the University of Kentucky and founded ICS, one of the largest mortgage credit reporting companies in the country. He sold ICS to a Fortune 500 company in 1996 and is now the managing partner of Titus Equity Partners LLC.
He is actively involved with several non-profit companies, including World Wide Open and Voice for Humanity. World Wide Open connects, empowers and involves Christians by using technology to link resource-rich people with resource-poor opportunities at the individual, church and ministry levels.
Voice for Humanity uses audio devices to bring life-saving, life-changing information to oral learners and illiterate people. The organization has played a role in all the recent elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, receiving a contract to go into Taliban strongholds in the Middle East to educate voters about political candidates. Voter registration and turnout have increased by 28 percent in the region.
Parliamentary and presidential candidates in Afghanistan recorded a promotional message on the audio devices, which were distributed to illiterate voters. “We have been invited back at each election cycle,” Ifland says.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, the goal is to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. Since many can’t read or write, the audio devices bring them preventive information about HIV/AIDS in ways they’re used to processing information. “We have well-known, influential people tell stories on these devices,” Ifland says. “Oral learners are used to gaining knowledge verbally and in groups through plays, songs and dramas rather than through a written, linear approach via pamphlets or seminars like we do in the West.”
Ifland has served on Westmont’s Board of Advisors for three years. He is married to Neile (Allen) Ifland ’84, and they have one daughter and two sons. Their daughter, Dani, graduated from the college this year, Kirby is a junior at Westmont, and Crawford is a freshman in high school.