Dear Faculty, Staff and Students,
As we kick off Blue Demon Week and celebrate our campus and community, we would also like to look ahead to the future and the role of philanthropy in supporting initiatives across DePaul.
Through the
Designing DePaul process, we heard from more than 3,000 students, parents, faculty, staff, trustees, alumni, retirees, and friends about what makes our university unique. Our dedication to reducing barriers to higher education and our commitment to creating a more peaceful, just, and equitable society continues to drive our vision for the future. Philanthropic expansion and sharing DePaul’s story with potential partners will be a key element of our future financial stability.
We would like to tell you more about where we are in the planning process for DePaul’s next comprehensive campaign, and how you can get involved.
A Campaign for the Future
The Division of Advancement and External Relations has been working with university leadership to design a comprehensive campaign that will raise funds in priority areas to help DePaul achieve its goal of becoming a national leader in higher education. Over the next few months, Advancement will engage in a feasibility study, an effort to assess internal preparedness and engagement levels of external partners, to determine optimal campaign goals and the best strategy to achieve them.
We anticipate that the campaign will grow from its original size and scope – and hope that we will raise somewhere between $750 million and $1 billion. The focus of this effort and the majority of funds raised will support our academic mission and our students.
An outline of the proposed priority areas that our university community will consider can be found in the infographic below:
Campaign Structure
While the work currently being done in Advancement will be used to finalize campaign themes, scope and implementation, key funding needs are beginning to be defined as:
- Access and completion, aligned with our goal to close the achievement gap, is a priority.
- Academic programming and excellence, the core of our promise to deliver a superior education, is an essential and significant piece of this endeavor. Faculty support, research, curriculum development, and new initiatives across colleges and units, will likely make up a third of our overall goal.
- Telling the story of innovation on our campus, including our commitment to interdisciplinary work, and solving large-scale societal challenges across such key pillars as poverty and inequality, environmental sustainability, and artificial intelligence, will allow us to engage new partners.
- Facilities and improvements to our physical plant across both campuses will strengthen our academic enterprise.
- Sustaining and enhancing the work surrounding our Vincentian mission will continue to be a theme across all our efforts.
Next Steps
The team in Advancement will be reaching out in the coming weeks and months to engage faculty and staff in the work of this campaign. Educational sessions will be held across colleges on both campuses. Advancement also is working with Faculty Council to propose new mechanisms for faculty to provide insight and support in identifying and understanding academic priorities.
Work will continue with all of the colleges and academic units to better define and understand the important work being done in the key priority areas listed above, including the launch of
structured Advancement support for each college and school.
Looking further into the future, Advancement will work with faculty in DePaul’s
centers, institutes and research labs to create a library of concept papers. The idea is for each concept paper to present your research - the details, impact, and initial outcomes - to university partners and donors as they consider areas to support at DePaul.
As we move forward and the comprehensive campaign continues to develop, Advancement will highlight progress and updates on the
Philanthropic Expansion page on the Designing DePaul website. Information on presentations and training, campaign goals and milestones, and details about philanthropic investments will all be shared.
If you have questions or ideas to share with Advancement about the comprehensive campaign, please send them to
svpadvancement@depaul.edu. We’re very excited to take this next step forward with you as we design a campaign that will unleash DePaul’s true capabilities.
Sincerely,
Robert L. Manuel
President
Katie Fraumann
Senior Vice President, Advancement and External Relations