CSU Fullerton’s First Comprehensive Campaign Was a Major Win
In March 2020, California State University, Fullerton (CSUF) publicly launched its first-ever comprehensive philanthropic campaign, aptly named “It Takes a Titan.” The response from the CSUF community — students, faculty, alumni, donors — was a resounding one. By the end of 2022, individuals, foundations, and corporations had together raised more than $270 million to support the ongoing needs of CSUF students. Some 145,704 individual gifts contributed to the total.
The budget for the 23 universities in the CSU system derives from two main sources. About 60 percent comes from the state’s General Fund. Most of the other 40 percent comes from tuition and fees. Donors and other philanthropic sources provide supplemental support.
Decreasing amounts of state funding, a growing student population, and infrastructure needing repair all increased operating costs over the years for CSUF. Yet the university still sought to honor its commitment to keeping higher education affordable for students. As a result, CSUF in 2020 found itself in need of additional support.
Meeting transformative goals
The central goal of CSUF’s first-ever comprehensive campaign was to provide students with the resources they needed to thrive academically and join an emerging workforce distinguished by a diversity that represents all Californians.
Specific priorities included academic innovation through support for teaching faculty and student-faculty research projects; student empowerment through scholarships and programs addressing food insecurity; campus transformation by improving the physical environment; and community enrichment by sustaining the work of, for example, the Center for Healthy Neighborhoods project at the College of Health and Human Development.
However, March 2020 could not have been a more inauspicious time to publicly launch a new funding campaign. Administrators initially set their vision on raising what seemed an ambitious $175 million.
As the economic and social costs of the COVID-19 pandemic made themselves clearer, and as the campaign went into virtual engagement mode, thousands of members at all levels of the CSUF community rallied around its students. As part of the larger campaign, they raised $600,000 to directly assist students thrown out of work and otherwise impacted by the pandemic. The generosity didn’t stop there. The final campaign total surpassing the $270 million is a mark of this Titan spirit.
Titans helping Titans
As the school’s leadership noted, the campaign was about Titans helping other Titans: More than $20 million of the campaign’s proceeds went to student scholarships. Thanks to the generous contributions, students discovered new depths of self-confidence, resilience, academic engagement, and leadership. They discovered and developed their voices, invigorating their communities’ collective ability to deliver equitable health care, solve real-world problems, expand scientific knowledge, and find ethical solutions to complex social and legal issues.
As one alumni donor put it, giving to CSUF is about passing on a sense of hope and transformative possibility to students. One of the campaign’s foundation partners noted that the CSUF mission of expanding equitable opportunities and social mobility dovetailed extremely well with its own.
The CSUF Philanthropic Foundation’s leading role
The CSUF Philanthropic Foundation was a keystone support for the “It Takes a Titan” campaign every step of the way.
Investment professional, philanthropist, and alumnus Jeff Van Harte ’80 has served lengthy terms on the foundation’s board of governors, including three years as its chair. A key founder and funder of the CSUF business school’s Titan Capital Management (TCM) program providing experiential learning in investment strategy for students, Mr. Van Harte was the foundation’s chair during the kickoff of the comprehensive campaign.
In this capacity, he challenged the foundation’s board: Take a leading role by contributing $5 million. The board far surpassed the ask, eventually directing $35 million toward the overall success of the campaign. The board’s contributions were boosted by a $40 million gift from major philanthropist Mackenzie Scott and her husband in 2021. Of that gift, the board and CSUF’s president designated $11 million for matching.
Scott’s unrestricted gift enhanced CSUF’s work empowering students, developing research, and nurturing diversity and inclusion. Scott’s philanthropic work centers the needs of historically marginalized communities, while about 78 percent of CSUF’s fall 2022 student body consisted of people from non-white backgrounds.
Mr. Van Harte himself made an extra gift to boost both the TCM investment portfolios and the program’s new Investment Research Center on campus. This gift was part of the matching campaign on the part of the board, which was able to easily fulfill its $11 million goal.
For Mr. Van Harte, giving back to his alma mater remains a highly effective way to equalize a playing field in which many major donors give to schools already rich in endowments, ignoring the public universities whose students come overwhelmingly from marginalized communities.
The board of governors of the CSUF Philanthropic Foundation oversees the full range of the school’s private donor gift management programs and investments. The foundation seeks to enhance community relationships while advocating on behalf of the university, its students, faculty, and innovative programs. The board works to engage existing stakeholders more fully and reach out to the broader community with an articulation of the university’s mission.
The overarching goal is to provide a transformational university experience, one that empowers students as the architects of their own — and their school’s and community’s — successes.
