The UW Foundation has raised $2.52 billion in student, faculty, program and facility support through Campaign UW: Creating Futures with five months remaining in the eight-year endeavor, the foundation announced Jan. 31.
Since the launch of the campaign in June 2000, endowments for student support—scholarships, fellowships and other support—have almost doubled, from 818 to 1,571. Endowments for faculty support—deanships, chairs and professorships—have more than doubled from 150 to 311. The value of the UW’s Consolidated Endowment Fund, similar to a mutual fund, has grown from about $887 million to nearly $2.19 billion.
Buildings funded during the campaign include the new law school building, William H. Gates Hall; the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering; the William H. Foege Building for bioengineering and genome sciences; and a new business school facility, PACCAR Hall.
At the Jan. 25 meeting of the UW Foundation, PACCAR Inc. and the company’s chairman and chief executive officer, Mark A. Pigott, were recognized for their recent $18 million gift that ensures a fall 2008 groundbreaking for the latest state-of-the-art addition to the Seattle campus. PACCAR Hall will be a 135,000-square-foot facility offering a combination of classrooms, faculty office space, a 250-seat auditorium, student lounges and a boardroom, built on the site of a parking lot north of Denny Hall.
During the campaign, the number of annual donors to the UW has doubled, from nearly 51,000 in 2000 to more than 105,000 last year. Since the start of Campaign UW, more than 246,000 individuals have invested in the University’s efforts, and more than 3,800 volunteers have given their time and energy to promote the campaign and the University’s initiatives.
Campaign UW: Creating Futures, which began in 2000, originally set a fundraising goal of $2 billion by June 30, 2008. When this milestone was achieved in January 2007, the goal was raised to $2.5 billion by the UW Foundation Board of Directors.
According to the Chronicle for Higher Education, the UW’s $2.5 billion total puts it among the top fund-raising universities in the nation. The record for completed campaigns goes to UCLA, which raised $3 billion over 10 years ending in 2005. But Stanford is in the midst of a $4.3 billion campaign scheduled to end in 2011.
“I couldn’t be more humbled by the level of commitment to this university shown by our community partners throughout the campaign so far,” says President Mark A. Emmert, ’75. “This remarkable generosity has truly transformed the University of Washington, with new student and faculty endowments that allow us to recruit top students and professors, new facilities for our researchers to advance their fields, and new programs, where our students and faculty work together to answer some of the biggest challenges of our time.”
“Gifts of every size have helped to strengthen every corner of this University, allowing our students, faculty and alumni to go out and do better work for our region and beyond. We still have five months remaining so we’ll continue to work hard to maintain momentum in order to keep a great enterprise like the University of Washington on a continued course of excellence,” says Campaign Chair William H. Gates Sr., ’48, ’49.
Campaign UW: Creating Futures officially ends on June 30. In the remaining months, the foundation will continue to focus its efforts on providing additional opportunities to increase student scholarships, improve faculty recruitment and retention, and enhance learning environments throughout the three campuses.
One of these priorities remains raising funds for the Students First matching program, which offers a 50 percent match on qualifying gifts targeted for undergraduate scholarships or graduate fellowships. Students First is an important component of the University’s Husky Promise initiative, which guarantees full tuition for academically qualified students from Washington state with family incomes of $50,500 or less for a family of four. This fall, approximately 5,550 students were covered by Husky Promise.
More information about Campaign UW: Creating Futures is available at http://www.uwfoundation.org.