A Letter from the Interim WSU Foundation Board Executive Director
Gary Evans
Interim WSU Foundation Board Executive Director
The Foundation set records in virtually every meaningful category, beginning with the all important category of income. Outstanding efforts on your part, donors, and work by the fundraising staff created income totaling $5.2 million. It is the first time the Foundation has eclipsed the $5 million mark, but better yet is the work that will be enabled.
The Foundation, which was honoring fewer than a dozen recipients at its first scholarship brunch, now is hosting more than 900 scholarship recipients, who are benefiting from more than $1 million in support. Those are enviable totals, and they could not have been done without you.
And so I am writing this message exclusively for our donors. You have provided wonderful support for our efforts as employees of the Advancement Division, but more importantly you have allowed our students, nearly half of them the first in their families to attend college, to complete their work here with less onerous student loan burdens.
Your generosity enables many things. . . things too numerous to mention in total. We talk about the impacts of your gifts, but we hear wonderful, sometimes heartbreaking stories about you, too. I’d like to share a few:
- A donor who, after being diagnosed with cancer, decided her kitchen remodeling project could wait and her plans to create a scholarship in Counselor Education
could not. The award she put into place will go to students who create a viable advocacy project that will make a difference in the lives of others. - Family members who agreed to contribute $10,000 each to endow a scholarship in memory of their parents who met here their freshman year in 1952.
- A benefactor who had to overcome a disability to finish college and graduate school and realized there are probably lots of students like her. Some of those students are now benefiting from the scholarship she has funded.
- A donor who always gives anonymously and now uses his interests to benefit students in the form of a creative writing contest and a soon-to-be-created innovation challenge.
- The quiet, humble man with a huge heart who visits the development office whenever he sees a need that should be met. He frequently drops off a check for
$5,000 or $10,000, noting quietly this department needs new computers, or that department needs new books. “See that they get what they need,” he always says, “but don’t let them know where it came from.”
These are examples of hundreds of reports I could make each year. Generosity is a wonderful thing. It does so very much. And not just the beneficiary wins. The greatest joy is frequently seen in the face of the giver.
It is a wonderful thing to work with people like you who every day teach us the true meaning of generosity. I am sincerely thankful for each of you!
With Gratitude,
Gary Evans
View the WSU_Currents_FY_2015.
