A Message from the Chancellor and the Chair

What can a bold, strategic, rigorously imagined fundraising effort like The Centennial Campaign for UCLA do for an already great institution like ours? It can rally our communities around a shared goal: to maintain and grow UCLA as a force for positive change in people’s lives. It can significantly expand our ability to bring great public higher education to a broad swath of society that couldn’t access it otherwise. It can enable us to build a new financial model based on self-reliance and powered by the participation of even greater numbers of UCLA alumni, fans, patrons, parents, patients and community partners.

Already, our community of donors has answered the call of The Centennial Campaign with full-throated enthusiasm and philanthropic commitments. Gifts and pledges to UCLA in 2013-2014 totaled a record-breaking $557 million in support of the university’s mission of teaching, research and service. This amount included more than $45 million in student support, $36 million in faculty support, $116 million for capital projects, $256 million in research funding and $104 million in discretionary support.

As our partnerships grow, so does our ability to tackle 21st-century challenges. A $10 million gift from New York Giants co-owner Steve Tisch to the department of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA for the UCLA Steve Tisch BrainSPORT Program is creating the world’s most sophisticated research, prevention, diagnosis and treatment program for concussions and brain injuries, with a particular emphasis on young athletes. Support for pioneering UCLA faculty is driving new innovations, like the new Internet architecture being developed by a team led by Lixia Zhang, who holds the Jonathan B. Postel Chair in Computer Science. Named after renowned computer scientist Jonathan Postel ’66, M.S. ’68, Ph.D. ’74, the chair was established by a distinguished group of Postel’s friends and family. And Plastpro, Inc. founder and chief executive officer and UCLA Foundation board member Shirley Wang ’90 and her husband, Walter, continued to inspire the philanthropic community with their most recent leadership gift in support of UCLA scholarships. The commitment provides momentum for the university’s student support initiative to raise $1 billion to help fulfill our mission to society as a public research university. (You can follow the Wangs’ lead here.)

Excellence is a moving target. The generosity and imagination of donors like you adds energy to the innovative approaches and fresh thinking needed to create a higher education model for a new century. Through your support of The Centennial Campaign—the single most important initiative in the history of the university—you are making transformation happen. All of us in your UCLA family are incredibly grateful for your philanthropy.

Gene D. Block
Chancellor, UCLA

William E. Mitchell
Chair, The UCLA Foundation