I’ve never really been involved in raising money before—well, let’s clarify. I’ve raised lots of money over the years to start new businesses or help others get started.
What I mean is raising money as in, “Hi, Bob. How are you? Can I buy you lunch next week?”
I know that call. It is always a cheerful call as if it is the most natural thing in the world to go for lunch even when you haven’t had lunch with this extraordinarily jovial person for 20 years.
The reason I have not been the initiator of these rituals in the past is that I am in the newspaper business. I felt that if I was asking for favours it would be easy and only natural for donors to ask favours when it came to news coverage or more likely an absence of news coverage.
Anyway, I threw caution to the wind a few years ago and joined The Next 50 Campaign at Laurentian University where I am a member of the board.
I did this because I have spent nearly 40 years in community development of one kind or another in Northern Ontario and I view all of our universities in Northern Ontario to be central to our growth as mature, prosperous and sustainable communities.
What I focused my attention on was our effort to create sustainable Northern economic development around the groundbreaking work done by David Robinson at the Institute of Northern Ontario Research and Development at Laurentian. I have always felt in Northern Ontario we rely more on emotion than facts, more political brokerage than data and that we need to change it. Henceforth, our effort to create an undergraduate program in sustainable development, a graduate program to fine-tune skills and finally a chair in Sustainable Northern Economic Development to help engage us regionally and internationally with best practices and talent around the world.
This stuff isn’t easy. All my buddies who get my cheerful call know darn well I’m not calling to see how Muriel and the kids are doing over lunch, although God knows I love Muriel and the kids. Some of these folks have developed extraordinarily polite and sophisticated ways to avoid the lunch, the talk, the coffee, the follow-up call, the note, the blandishments, the guilt, the passion, the importance, the candor—the desperation. I admire them. We all pick causes and as long as you are in the game helping out somewhere you’ll get no complaint from me.
Although my quest continues for my pet project, The Next 50 Campaign has officially wrapped up. It has been extraordinarily successful.
Goal: $50 million. Result: $65 million.
Total number of donors: 9,585.
Alumni donors: 4,947.
Donors from Sudbury: 4,366.
This campaign has marked some extraordinary ground for Sudbury. The first marker is that when I came to Sudbury in 1973 it was owned and operated by Inco, Falconbridge, the Steelworkers and the Mine Mill union. If you raised money, that is where you went. Sudbury was still, in many ways, a company town. Although Vale, Xstrata, the Steelworkers and the CAW have been generous with their gifts, things are different today. Sudbury has grown up. It is no longer just their job to make the city work. It is everyone’s job.
Sudbury families stood up and donated more than $14 million to this campaign.
The City of Sudbury stepped up and donated $10 million for the new School of Architecture, and this amount is not included in fundraising totals.
Stan Bharti, who once lived and taught at Laurentian in Sudbury, came back to say thank you with a $10-million investment and had the school of engineering named after him. Ned Goodman, one of Canada’s top entrepreneurs, came to Sudbury and made a huge donation to help build the Ned Goodman School of Mines.
All three of these developments are unprecedented. As Sudbury stood up to support its university, the rest of the world came to an institution gaining their respect every day. There are many to congratulate: our dynamic young president, Dominic Giroux, who never stopped pitching; the development team that upped its game each year; our campaign chairs, Scott McDonald and Terry MacGibbon, who wouldn’t take no for an answer; my old friend Perry Dellelce, who willed the family campaign to success along with co-chairs John Pollesel and Dario Zulich; Jamie Wallace, our honorary chair; the staff and professors of LU, who are committed to building a better institution every day of the week; and of course the thousands and thousands of donors who really understand the importance of their university and what it means to our future.
If you want something and you work your tail off to get it, it changes you.
Thank you.
