Ellen Medearis will assume the role of executive director of University development, becoming the University's primary fundraising coordinator. Medearis will coordinate fundraising for some of the goals President Richard Brodhead outlined in his inaugural address.
President Richard Brodhead outlined some of his goals for Duke in his inaugural address Saturday, and Ellen Medearis is prepared to help finance them.
Medearis will assume the role of executive director of university development Oct. 4, becoming the University’s primary fundraising coordinator. Medearis will oversee the Annual Fund, Development Services, Gift Planning, Corporate and Foundation Relations, Communications and Donor Relations and Leadership and Major Gifts. She directed the latter during the Campaign for Duke, which raised $2.36 billion between 1996 and 2003.
“Her role has been pretty big for the past several years, but now it is a leadership role,” said Peter Vaughn, director of communications and donor relations for the development office. “It will require leadership, energy and a talent for working with donors and those who work with donors. She’s very good at all these things.”
With the University between capital campaigns, Medearis aims to emphasize more general aspects of development by getting more people to contribute to Duke.
“We’re trying to increase support from individuals,” she said. “We have a big focus on personal donation. Number one, we want people to support the Annual Fund, to get involved and to stay involved.”
Brodhead stressed an increased commitment to financial aid in his inauguration speech, and Medearis will be on the front lines of whatever fundraising is demanded by this initiative. Brodhead pledged to gather “the support to assure that this school never closes its doors to a worthy applicant,” and Medearis acknowledged that such a plan can have direct and indirect benefits for the University.
“In particular [University fundraisers] want to support need-blind financial aid,” she said. “If we had a greater endowment for financial aid, it would allow us to do more in other areas, too.”
Princeton University’s financial aid budget is famous for being entirely endowed, whereas Duke’s financial aid funds are drawn from the University’s operational budget. Duke will seek a greater separation between the two funds, but officials acknowledge that total separation—a la Princeton—is a far-off hope for Duke.
“That’s a very ambitious and idealistic goal, but Princeton has raised money for decades,” said John Burness, senior vice president for public affairs and government relations. “Ideally, it would be wonderful, but we will have to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to get to that point.”
Burness added that the first step in raising the money to support Duke’s financial aid program is assembling a group of fundraisers. He called Medearis, Vice President for Alumni Affairs and Development Bob Shepard and Director of Annual Giving and Major Gifts Sterly Wilder “an incredibly strong team.” The next step, officials say, is to develop a direction for a future capital campaign.
“A fundamental prerequisite of any capital campaign is having a very strategic academic plan,” Burness said. “You establish institutional priorities with an academic plan before you do anything else.”
It is unclear when Brodhead’s initial capital campaign will begin, but the University’s current strategic plan, “Building on Excellence,” expires in February 2005, and Burness said some fundraising priorities would emerge during the current academic year. The Campaign for Duke began three years into Keohane’s term, but officials said there is no magic number of years before presidents typically begin.
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