Advancing Georgetown Campaign

[DanMcQ]

campaign.georgetown.edu/

Generous Donor Gives $5.5M to Power Future Transformative Opportunities

Georgetown University has announced a $5.5 million gift from an anonymous donor to support what the university is calling "transformative opportunities." These are areas that will help define the Georgetown of the future as the university builds on established strengths, pioneers new fields and expands its capacity to have positive impact on the world in which we live.

After a careful planning exercise, the university has identified transformative opportunities in fields including, though not limited to, public policy, environmental studies, personalized cancer treatments, interreligious understanding and transactional law.

Transformative opportunities are one of the four strategic pillars of the university’s $1.5 billion fundraising campaign, For Generations to Come, which will have its public launch October 27 to 30.

The anonymous donor made the gift – without restrictions – to support the university’s highest priorities, at the discretion of the president and board. Pending discussions with the donors, the university intends to use it as a standing fund, managed over the longer term as unrestricted endowment, to provide bridge funding or to fund early-stage start-up costs associated with transformative opportunities that will ultimately be funded by other donors. In that sense, it is a seed fund or a start-up venture capital fund that will help to incubate big investments in the future of the university.

[CAHoya07]

I hope that some of those "future transformative opportunities" include athletics - including, though not limited to, building the IAC and finishing the MSF.

Also, hopefully "athletics" is one of the four strategic pillars of this campaign? I, we, can only hope...

[PhillyHoya]

Oct 26, 2011 4:28:15 GMT -5 CAHoya07 said:

I hope that some of those "future transformative opportunities" include athletics - including, though not limited to, building the IAC and finishing the MSF.

Also, hopefully "athletics" is one of the four strategic pillars of this campaign? I, we, can only hope...

Athletics is part of the Student Life and Community Experience pillar: campaign.georgetown.edu/experience.html. Don't hold your breath on the MSF though.

[theexorcist]

$5.5M buys a great opposition research team to find pictures and video of various conference commissioners in compromising situations. This sounds like a reasonable way to ensure an invite to a legitimate conference.

[jerseyhoya34]

Have they released online blueprints for the IAC?

[PhillyHoya]

Oct 26, 2011 10:07:39 GMT -5 @jerseyhoya34 said:

Have they released online blueprints for the IAC?

I doubt it. They're still in negotiations with the Old Georgetown Board over the exterior design.

[PhillyHoya]

If you're interested in watching a webcast of tomorrow's "Afternoon of Ideas" program, go here: www.georgetown.edu/webcast/afternoon-of-ideas.html

It starts at 2:15PM ET and features a number of big names:

ACTION
Alonzo Mourning (C’92)
Founder and Chairman of Alonzo Mourning Charities, Inc.,
Seven-Time NBA All-Star

PLAY AND PROFIT

Paul Tagliabue (C’62)
Former NFL Commissioner, and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Georgetown University

John Thompson III
Head Coach of the Georgetown University Men’s Basketball Program

Moderator: John J. DeGioia, PhD
President of Georgetown University

CURES FOR ALL

Dr. Lucile Adams-Campbell
Associate Director of Minority Health and Disparities,
Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center

Dr. Howard Federoff
Executive Vice President for Health Sciences,
Executive Dean of Georgetown University School of Medicine

NEW WORLD ORDER

The Honorable Madeleine Albright
Former Secretary of State of the United States,
Mortara Distinguished Professor of Diplomacy

His Royal Highness Prince Turki al-Faisal
Chairman of the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies,
Former Saudi Arabian Ambassador to the United States

Moderator: Anthony Arend, PhD (F’80)
Professor of Government and Foreign Service,
Director of the MSFS Program

THE STATE OF CAPITALISM

Michael Ferguson (MPP’95)
Chairman and CEO of Ferguson Strategies LLC
Former Representative from New Jersey

Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (C’93, L’97)
Principal Attorney at OFW Law
Former Representative from South Dakota

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend
Member of the Board of Directors of the Center for American Progress
Former Lieutenant Governor of Maryland

Moderator: E.J. Dionne
Columnist, The Washington Post,
Professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute

INNOVATION

Ted Leonsis (C’77)
Founder and Chairman of Monumental Sports and Entertainment,
Member of the Board of Directors of Georgetown University

[DanMcQ]

giving.georgetown.edu/story/chair-funds-scholarships-initiatives.html

[Gold Hoya]

Oct 27, 2011 19:53:40 GMT -5 DanMcQ said:

giving.georgetown.edu/story/chair-funds-scholarships-initiatives.html

Former National Football League Commissioner Paul J. Tagliabue (C'62) and his wife, Chandler, have made a $5 million gift to Georgetown University, more than half of which will go toward student scholarships. Tagliabue is the chair of Georgetown’s board of directors ....

The scholarships for student-athletes in women’s and men’s intercollegiate sports will help Georgetown endow a growing portion of the annual costs of existing athletic scholarships, including all those for men’s and women’s basketball. Tagliabue himself attended Georgetown on a basketball scholarship and graduated as a Dean’s List student and president of his senior class.

Do I read this as Tags endowing every basketball scholarship, or contributing toward the campaign goal of endowing every basketball scholarship? Either way it's great.

[DanMcQ]

Campaign Chair William Doyle announces $10M gift to permanently endow the Doyle Engaging Difference Initiative:

giving.georgetown.edu/story/doyle-diversity-gift.html

[CWS]

New campaign video.

campaign.georgetown.edu/media.html

I liked it. A good balance of the serious and aspirational coupled with light humor and traditional school pride. (fr. Hentz: "some of them have their helmets on too tight"; always loved that line of his).

[strummer8526]

Oct 31, 2011 8:09:11 GMT -5 CWS said:

New campaign video.

campaign.georgetown.edu/media.html

I liked it. A good balance of the serious and aspirational coupled with light humor and traditional school pride. (fr. Hentz: "some of them have their helmets on too tight"; always loved that line of his).

Good video. Two thoughts:

1. I get the doors theme, and I think I really like it. I'll be interested to see how it's tied in throughout the campaign. But I like how it's done in this video.

2. Every video relating to Georgetown should begin with the bells. Several of our basketball videos and I think maybe our TV spot during games have that beginning. Everything should. It would be kind of cool if that sound became instantly recognizable (at least to GU folks) as a sign that a University-created video is starting.

[jerseyhoya34]

This is very impressive. As of last night, we were already halfway home, presumably because of large gifts that were already locked up. Still, I wish we had something like this every year, even if "only" for $500 million. It sure would be nice to have a campaign of that size on a regular basis mostly for endowment so we can access funds for large projects before we're forced to press the crisis button.*

*See the athletics fundraising in this new campaign. While it has been planned for some time, I think few would disagree that we hit the crisis stage at least five years ago with respect to McDonough particularly. Along those lines, I've had more contact with GU since the BE all but imploded, but why did it have to wait until then?

[Cambridge]

While I agree that it would be nice to have a similar campaign yearly, capital campaigns of this nature take a lot of planning, organization and behind the scenes work. Most fundraising campaigns of this nature run out over several years. How many seven or eight figure donors do you think are in the alumni pool? How often can they be tapped? An annual $500m campaign seems wildly unrealistic.

[theexorcist]

Alumni don't also like being considered ATMs every year.

[DanMcQ]

From an email this morning sent by Bart Moore:

As long planned, we completed “For Generations to Come: The Campaign for Georgetown” at midnight this morning — and it’s been an overwhelmingly successful effort to advance our university’s mission and ambitions.

As you’ll see below, I’m leaving insufficient time for the dust to settle and the counting to be completed. And in short course, President DeGioia, Board (and Campaign) Chairman Bill Doyle, and our other university leaders will join me in expressing our gratitude. But I wanted to let no time pass before getting started . . .

Let me review a few highlights of our work together:

Although we’re still counting and cross-checking, we have exceeded our overall campaign goal of $1.5 billion by at least $120 million...

We’ve set new records for total donors consistently, year over year, and although we’re still counting and record checking, we believe we have set a new, all-time high mark for undergraduate alumni participation of 35%...

We have raised more for student scholarships than in the entire preceding history of the university (and we’re still counting)!

As much as the financial downturn’s aftermath loomed over the launch of the campaign in October 2011, I never doubted that our community would do what it always does and rise to the occasion. But still, your generosity, service, leadership and commitment overwhelm and humble me.

[strummer8526]

Is Bonnie helping with the count?

[RusskyHoya]

February 9, 2024
Dear (RusskyHoya),

It’s the nature of my work that even as we celebrate a major milestone, I am looking ahead to the next, inevitably higher, peak to scale. This means that as we closed the For Generations to Come campaign in 2016 full of joy and gratitude that we’d not only met but exceeded our ambitious $1.5 billion goal, my team and I were already well into the work of setting our next decade’s worth of goals.

With the launch of Called to Be: The Campaign for Georgetown almost a year ago, we publicly committed to raising $3 billion, literally doubling down on our success in the Generations campaign. In the early planning phases, it was hard to see the path to such a significant increase—and that was before the world shut down in the face of a pandemic.

If you had asked me in spring of 2020 whether we would be able to achieve our then not-quite-official-yet goal of $3 billion, I would have been hard pressed to give you an optimistic answer. And I suspect you would not have expected one—we were living through an extraordinary disruption, something few of us had ever before experienced.


So it is with tremendous gratitude and satisfaction that I share with you today that less than one year after the launch of the Called to Be campaign, we have crossed the $2 billion mark, two-thirds of the way to our goal and nearly one-quarter more than we raised in the (extraordinarily successful) Generations campaign.

Our success to date is no mystery: it’s because of our extraordinary community, who insisted on coming together virtually during the pandemic and then returned in-person with incredible enthusiasm as soon as we were able, always asking how you could help, how you could do more. Your constancy, your belief in Georgetown and its unique role in service to the common good, your vision and generosity are why we have not missed a beat in our campaign to date. I am, as always, deeply grateful to be part of this community.

As we reflect—briefly, there’s much more work to do—on this shared accomplishment, I hope you’ll take a moment to explore the stories of many of the wonderful gifts we’ve received to date in the Called to Be campaign. With $1 billion left to reach our goal, there are many more stories in the making.

Be well,
Bart

R. Bartley Moore (SFS’87)
Vice President, Advancement