This year’s Giving Day event raised triple the amount from last year’s and featured over double the projects.
Last year’s event raised roughly $800,000 and featured around 50 different projects according to the Director of Annual Giving at the UW Foundation, Jack Tennant.
This year, the event raised $2.4 million for over 100 participating organizations and projects.
“What’s cool to see now is all of these funds go into all of these different departments across campus,” Tennant said. “[Funds] to use to do things they normally wouldn’t be able to do.”
The annual Giving Day event, run by the UW Foundation, aims to encourage donations to projects around campus for the benefit of students.
This year’s event took place from Oct. 20 to Oct. 21 during homecoming week and saw unprecedented support from students and alumni alike.
This unexpected support benefited over double the expected number of projects.
“We always talk about philanthropy. It provides that extra level of support of these units,” Tennant said. “The goal of all of this is to impact the University of Wyoming and all of these areas through philanthropy.”
Projects benefit academic departments and student organizations all over campus, including club sports, special projects in colleges and departments across campus, and donations to endowments for various student populations.
This year’s most highly funded project was the Division of Communication Disorders, which raised a total of $436,450 of the total $500,904 funded by the College of Health Sciences as a whole.
Dr. Mark Guiberson, Director and professor of Child Language in the division, helped set up the campaign.
Guiberson said donations supported numerous projects in the division, allowing donors to select exactly what their donation would be supporting.
“It was looking really great, just as it has in previous years,” Guiberson said. “And then right before Giving Day was about to end, we received a major gift that was towards something we had been working with a donor on.”
This donation came from Maggie and Dick Scarlett. Maggie is an alumna of the program, and both have an extensive history of contributions and support given to the university as a whole.
“This gift is part of an entire gift of $1.5 million that will support an endowed excellence chair in speech-language pathology,” Guiberson said. “For us, for our students, and for our faculty, that is an incredible gift that is going to change and help us maintain the excellence that our programs offer.”
Among the programs supported by these donations is the Steve Elliot Communication Disorders Scholarship endowment, which provides scholarship support to students in the program every year.
This is just one of the many campaigns that will directly benefit students, and many more seek to improve the support given to specific student populations, such as the United We Dream campaign by ASUW.
United We Dream sought to create a new endowment to support International and DACA students at UW. This project was initiated in February of last year according to ASUW president, Hunter Swilling.
“The reason we wanted to create this was basically, ASUW already gives a lot of scholarships to other students,” Swilling said. “We had a robust coverage of what students could get scholarships. We didn’t have anything for this group.”
“During Covid, American citizens could get the refund checks, they could get support from the university, but non-US citizens weren’t eligible for that. A lot of them also couldn’t travel home,” Swilling said. “We couldn’t do anything about it right then, but we wanted to prevent this from happening in the future.”
The United We Dream campaign raised $70,000 from donors, and ASUW added $125,000 through a 3:1 matching campaign and a challenge campaign.
It was the project with the 5th most student donors. To learn more about all these campaigns and over 100 others, visit www.uwyo.edu/givingday
