Consistency and participation are keys to success for the Kenyon Fund--and contributors to the College's reputation
By any measure, Richard L. Thomas '53 P'81 H'72 has been an extraordinarily loyal alumnus. An alumni leader in a variety of capacities, he has served as a College trustee since 1967 and twice as the board's chair. Perhaps the most astonishing evidence of his loyalty, though, is this: he has contributed to the Kenyon Fund every year, without fail, since his graduation.
Thomas was recently honored by the Chicago chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals for his leadership in that city's philanthropic community. And just as he has provided the motivation for many of his peers in the business world to support civic betterment in Chicago, he has helped to lead both his classmates and his fellow trustees to new heights of giving-on a regular, annual basis-to the College.
Consistency of that sort, as the annual-funds staff wants to remind alumni, parents, and friends, is no small matter.
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| Director of Annual Funds Jo Ann M. Usher P'94 |
"We know Kenyon faces stiff competition among its peer institutions for the best students and faculty members," she adds. "In this kind of admissions market, the College needs to do everything possible to enhance its edge. One thing we can do is increase participation in the Kenyon Fund, because so many people perceive the best colleges to be those with the highest percentages of alumni giving."
Usher notes that the perception is recognized in the annual rankings of colleges and universities in U.S. News and World Report, which take into account an institution's fundraising from alumni. This year, Kenyon took the twenty-ninth spot overall, in the top tier of fifty, among the 217 national liberal-arts colleges. The College's annual-giving rank, however, was forty-eighth. Nevertheless, as of November 30, 2002, the Kenyon Fund had experienced a 52 percent increase over the number of donors at the same time the previous year.
"Kenyon alumni believe in the quality of the education they received at the College, as evidenced by the most recent alumni survey's finding that about 90 percent of the respondents would still choose to attend Kenyon," says Executive Director of Alumni and Parent Programs Lisa Dowd Schott '80. "I believe that loyalty to the College, and a strong conviction that Kenyon offers the highest quality brand of liberal education, should translate into financial support of the College. Every gift to Kenyon influences the quality of education offered, regardless of the size of the donation."
Among the alumnae, Julia F. Johnson '73 has one of the longest unbroken records of giving. A member of the College's first full graduating class of women, she has gone on to two distinguished careers, first in state government and then in banking. Johnson, who recently retired as senior vice president from Bank One Corporation, is in the final year of her second term as an alumni trustee at Kenyon.
"Even before I became a trustee and got a glimpse of the inner workings of the College's budget, I found that supporting the Kenyon Fund was very appealing because of its emphasis on operating support," says Johnson. "Despite the College's relatively small endowment, Kenyon has been able to compete effectively in a number of areas with its richer peers because of the strength of its annual funds. That makes giving to the annual funds very satisfying."
Thomas J. Magliery '96, now a post-doctoral fellow in chemistry at Yale University, made a point of giving something back to the College through the Kenyon Fund throughout his time in graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley. The same is true for his wife, Sloan McMullin Magliery'96, an English teacher at Hamden Hall Country Day School who earned her master's degree at Stanford University.
"Most of the College's living alumni are young, and there is a bright future ahead for Kenyon if our classes eventually give at the level of the smaller classes that preceded us," Tom Magliery observes. "But we can already add enormous value to the College even with smaller gifts. That's because these gifts, and the numbers of these gifts, help not only to power Kenyon's everyday operations but also to raise its stature. And they presage even better days to come for our alma mater."
[CAPTION FOR CHART]
The chart shown here illustrates Kenyon's relative position among its peer institutions. The College ranks near the middle in the group of sixteen institutions, in which participation ranges from a high of 60.1 percent for Hamilton College to a low of 34.4 percent for the College of Wooster.
"Annual giving - and truly consistent giving - is essential to the College's fiscal health, which is, of course, important to Kenyon's ability to attract and retain the highest quality faculty members and students and to offer them the best possible experience, in and out of the classroom," notes Linda Bunsey Friedman, a fellow member of the Class of 1973 and another loyal contributor to the annual fund. "Just as we depend on our own incomes to support our families' lifestyles, the College depends on our regular gifts to plan its budget make programmatic decisions.
"Ideally, all of us alumni would contribute every year as a matter of habit and pride, even though we might not be able to give as much in some years as we do in others," says Friedman, an alumna of the Vanderbilt University Law School who practices with Bradley, Arant, Rose, and White in Birmingham, Alabama. "Making an annual unrestricted gift to Kenyon gives you a feeling of staying connected to the College and the satisfaction of knowing that you're helping new generation of students to experience Kenyon's distinctive academics and community life."
Thomas J. Magliery '96, now a post-doctoral fellow in chemistry at Yale University, made a point of giving something back to the College through the Kenyon Fund throughout his time in graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley. The same is true for his wife, Sloan McMullin Magliery '96, an English teacher at Hamden Hall Country Day School who earned her master's degree at Stanford University.
"Most of the College's living alumni are young, and there is a bright future ahead for Kenyon if our classes eventually give at the level of the smaller classes that preceded us," Tom Magliery observes. "But we can already add enormous value to the College even with smaller figts. That's because these gifts, and the numbers of these gifts, help not only to power Kenyon's everyday operations but also to raise its stature. And they presage even better day sto come for our alma mater."