Private donors increased fundraising at UC Santa Cruz to $25.7 million for the 2006-07 academic year, a 19-percent increase over the previous year. These funds provide crucial support for everything from improved teaching in the nation's classrooms to a state-of-the-art automated planet-finder telescope. Donors also created new endowed faculty positions in four areas of study.
"Every gift enhances our ability to educate students and seek solutions to the challenges facing the world," said UC Santa Cruz Chancellor George Blumenthal. "This impressive level of commitment will make a tremendous difference throughout UC Santa Cruz. We are enormously grateful to our many donors for supporting our academic initiatives as well as our service to the wider community."
UCSC's program to help public schools across the nation retain new teachers in the profession received an especially strong vote of confidence, raising nearly $8 million. The New Teacher Center received its largest grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which gave $3.8 million to advance the center's work. The New Teacher Center collaborates with school districts in more than 30 states to improve retention and instruction for beginning teachers, and recently has extended its assistance to school principals. Other major supporters included the Carnegie Foundation, the Morgan Family Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, the Lloyd A. Fry Foundation, the Stupski Foundation, the Payne Family Foundation, and the MetLife Foundation.
Looking far beyond the classroom, the Gloria and Kenneth Levy Foundation provided $600,000 to help fund an integral part of the Automated Planet Finder Telescope-a state-of-the-art spectrometer now being built at Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton. Lick Observatory is one of two ground-based observatories operated by the University of California Observatories (UCO). Headquartered on the UC Santa Cruz campus, UCO is also managing partner of the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The new telescope will collect starlight, directing it into the spectrometer, bringing within reach the goal of discovering Earth-sized planets in other solar systems.
Donors also showed a strong commitment to supporting faculty by establishing endowed funds for faculty positions, increasing the number of such funds to 23. The new endowed positions are the Jack Baskin Endowed Chair in Technology and Information Management; the Peggy Downes Baskin Endowed Humanities Chair for Interdisciplinary Studies in Ethics; the Jean H. Langenheim Endowed Chair in Plant Ecology and Evolution; and the Sarabjit Singh Aurora Endowed Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies.
In addition, $2.27 million was raised through Annual Giving programs, including more than $509,424 from alumni. Alumni also contributed $182,881 in reunion giving. Trustees of the UC Santa Cruz Foundation, which supports the campus through advocacy and private fundraising efforts, gave $1.4 million. UCSC students helped raised an additional $549,605 by reaching out to alumni and parents through the student-run Telephone Outreach Program, in which donors direct their contributions to specific campus needs.
