November 2004

Fundraising

School Annual Fund Marks 50 Years

Fifty years ago, a committee of the Business School Alumni Association came up with an idea it thought would help the School. Committee members created a fund that today is the backbone of the School's financial health, channeling over $62 million in gifts during the past 26 years alone to support everything from faculty recruitment to improving facilities.

The Business School Fund, established in 1954, was seen as a way alumni could help the School grow. "If we unite our efforts," Bert Carr, MBA '30, the first chairman of the fund committee, said at the time, "we will aid the GSB materially in maintaining its position as one of the leading professional schools in the country." His fellow alumni apparently agreed. In the first six months, 304 of them contributed $6,500 (about $46,000 in today's dollars) for the Business School Fund. Last fiscal year, more than 5,000 alumni gave approximately $8.8 million to the fund.

"Our goals are exactly the same today as they were when the fund was created," said Ellen Otto, director of annual and reunion giving. "Fifty years ago, the alumni wanted to maintain and increase the reputation of the School by providing resources for expanded research leading to new and challenging courses, more faculty, financial aid for students as well as better facilities. Today, the Business School Fund supports those same goals: This discretionary income gets to work immediately for the School, even before we begin to raise endowment for new programs."

The School has just launched the five-year 50th Celebration of the Business School Fund with a goal of raising $10 million annually, about 10 percent of the School's operating revenues. It is part of a larger fundraising initiative that will be launched early next year.

"Income from the Business School Fund is our competitive advantage," says current chairman Rocky Barber, MBA '75. "Flexible seed funding is what has moved the GSB from a modest local school to one of the elite business schools in the world, within the relatively short institutional timespan of 50 years. We've come this far in just 50 years. Imagine what we can do in the next 50."

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