After many years of student activism calling for a resource for Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) students at The Claremont Colleges, on June 2, 2003 the Council of the Presidents voted to establish an Advisory Board for five-college APIDA student programming to serve the undergraduate institutions. This decision was based on an extensive Student Affairs Committee (SAC) study of needs identified by the Asian American Student Alliance (AASA), a student group seeking the establishment of a five-college Asian American Student Center. This outcome was a cross-campus collaborative effort by the student deans, students, and the Student Affairs Committee.
Since the fall of 2003, AdBoard started programming to support developing a 5-C APIDA community. Administrative duties rotated annually among the five undergraduate colleges, creating discontinuity in procedures and lapses in institutional memory. In the academic year of 2012-2013, AdBoard gained a Program Coordinator position and received additional support from the two graduate institutions, Claremont Graduate University and Keck Graduate Institute, extending AdBoard’s potential support across the 7Cs. The Program Coordinator is anchored at Pomona College’s Asian American Resource Center and supports bookkeeping, programming, and student development. AdBoard meets weekly and consists of two student representatives and a staff representative from each college.