IGNITE: The Campaign for UCF

IGNITE T h e C a m pa i g n f o r U C F

The most ambitious fundraising effort in the University of Central Florida’s history, IGNITE: The Campaign for

2019. Always an innovator, UCF stands poised to emerge — with your help — as a new model for public higher

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Ideas ignite here —

Led by students, nurtured by faculty

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and powered by philanthropy.

Together, we REIMAGINE the future.

— UCF President John C. Hitt

UCF seeks to inspire $500 million in mission-critical support from alumni, friends and partners by the middle of

r education in the 21st century. The opportunities to join this historic effort are innumerable. Read on.

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IGNITE the Future By harnessing the remarkable power of scale, UCF is challenging long-held assumptions about the role and scope of public higher education. And with a strategic infusion of philanthropic support, we are poised to emerge as the first of a new category of university, uniquely suited to meet the challenges and pursue the opportunities of a rapidly changing world.

In higher education, bigger isn’t supposed to equal better. Open the doors wider, and academic rigor suffers. It’s a tenet so universally accepted that it has its own nickname: “the iron triangle.” Tinker with one of the triangle’s three points — cost, access and quality — and the other two react to maintain a kind of equilibrium.

But UCF is different. As we grow past 63,000 students, this remarkable university keeps getting, paradoxically, better. Entering freshman grades and test scores, first-year retention rates and graduation rates are all climbing in step with the size of our student body. Published rankings are following the same steady upward trend. So is our reputation for research and innovation.

UCF is excelling elsewhere too, in areas other institutions don’t like to talk about: maximizing value for students, who graduate with less debt and find more jobs than their counterparts across the nation; forging strategic partnerships with other academic institutions, industry and public-sector organizations; and deliberately aligning teaching, research and service initiatives to fuel our region’s economy.

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IGNITE THE FUTURE

An Audacious Goal, A Simple Formula

We’re not simply managing to maintain a standard of excellence in spite of being big.

Instead, we’re intentionally leveraging the remarkable power of scale to break through outmoded perceptions of what a public university can or can’t do. The way we see it, we’re here to make a better future both for our students and for our society. It’s an audacious goal, but our formula is simple: scale x excellence = impact.

We didn’t grow to become one of the nation’s largest universities by chance. Rather, our size is the result of a commitment to creating unprecedented access for deserving students, not by lowering academic standards but by opening innovative new pathways to success — by meeting students where they are based on who they are, from first-generation freshmen to military veterans and from National Merit Scholars to nontraditional transfer students. And that kind of access to top-of-the-line education has the power to unleash massive stores of untapped human potential.

In 2012, at a celebration of his 20 years of service to UCF, President John C. Hitt said, “If there is anything I have learned … it is that our greatest danger is not to dream too large, but to dream too small.” Inspired by the big dreams of our students, we have always dreamed large. Now, poised to emerge as an entirely new kind of university — one that by matching access with excellence has the potential to fundamentally transform our future — we ask you to join us in realizing those dreams.

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IGNITE THE FUTURE

Philanthropy: The Spark

In order to fulfill UCF’s vast potential in an era of flat or declining state funding for public higher education, we turn to philanthropic support as our margin of excellence, seeking $500 million in gifts by the middle of 2019 through IGNITE: The Campaign for UCF.

Although IGNITE is the most ambitious fundraising effort in our history, it is not without precedent. In fact, without the extraordinary collective philanthropic effort five decades ago of a group of 89 visionary Orlando residents who put up $1 million of their own money to help purchase land for the campus of the newly conceived university, UCF might not exist today.

Back then, the institution was founded primarily as a nearby source of engineers and scientists for the burgeoning space program. Like one of the towering rockets those early graduates worked on, UCF is on the launch pad, fueled and ready. Philanthropy can, yet again, serve as the vital spark that lights the engines, that touches off the waiting future.

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IGNITE THE FUTURE

Campaign Priorities

Through IGNITE, we seek to channel our collective energies and resources into a strategic effort to infuse UCF with $500 million in mission-critical philanthropic support, directed to three key priorities:

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f Student Success By expanding access through alternative pathways, by

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f Academic Excellence By attracting and retaining top faculty members, by

making a UCF education affordable to all deserving students through scholarships and fellowships, and by expanding programs that enrich the student experience and prepare students for success after graduation, we will continually strive to offer the best education to one of the nation’s largest and most diverse student bodies.

supporting the work of interdisciplinary faculty clusters, by helping fund critical research, and by providing the most advanced learning facilities and technologies, we will further elevate UCF’s academic environment and spur exciting and relevant discoveries.

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f Growth and Opportunity By leveraging existing strengths, seeking strategic

partnerships and pursuing new opportunities — including expanding UCF’s presence in downtown Orlando, promoting interdisciplinary endeavors to develop innovative health care solutions, contributing to a healthier environment, and expanding global initiatives — we will strive to lift lives and livelihoods across Central Florida and beyond.

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IGNITE THE FUTURE

From the Chair

In the following pages, you’ll learn much more about the three priorities of IGNITE: The Campaign for UCF. While impossible to address every one of the innumerable ways our alumni, friends and partners can positively impact UCF, it’s a great beginning.

Think of this as no more than a source of inspiration, a starting point from which to explore the places and ways in which your own philanthropic priorities might intersect with UCF’s to create potentially life-changing impact.

It’s also important to understand that while a $500 million infusion of philanthropic support has the power to fundamentally change UCF, it is only the beginning.

What’s most important is establishing a culture of philanthropy at our young university — with a deep understanding that private support is crucial to our continued success.

This sense of shared responsibility for the future is one of the hallmarks of our nation’s premier universities.

Today, as volunteer chair of IGNITE, I’m asking all Knights, along with UCF’s many loyal friends and partners, to be part of this historic effort. Together, we can IGNITE the future. Please join us!

Rick Walsh ’77 ’83MS IGNITE Campaign Chair

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Student success

Priority: Student Success $200 Million At UCF, our first concern is with making the university accessible and affordable to as many deserving students as possible and then ensuring their academic progress, personal development and career readiness.

Through IGNITE, we seek $200 million in philanthropic commitments to support scholarships, programs and initiatives that directly benefit both current and future Knights by advancing five key goals:

f Expand access for deserving students by meeting them where they are,

based on who they are. Innovative new pathways to and through higher education broaden opportunity without diluting quality.

f Fund need-based scholarships to help negate socioeconomic background as

a predictor of graduation. No promising student should ever fail to graduate because he or she runs out of money. f Attract the best and brightest students by offering incentives like prestigious, merit-based scholarships. When academic superstars come to UCF, their peers, the university and the region benefit.

f Enrich the university experience through expanded campus programming,

service-learning opportunities and study abroad. Some of the most valuable learning takes place outside the classroom.

f Prepare students for rewarding careers by bolstering experiential learning

opportunities and expanding career readiness programs. A UCF degree is not an end in itself; it is only the beginning.

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IGNITE Student success

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Expand Access FOR DESERVING STUDENTS

For centuries, the higher education world has accepted the idea that making an institution accessible to a broader cross-section of students means lowering academic standards. But it doesn’t have to. At UCF, we are committed to expanding access by creating new means of entry and success for students who have the potential to excel but are unable to follow traditional pathways to and through college.

Consider the DirectConnect to UCF program, for example, which guarantees admission to students completing two-year degrees at one of UCF’s six partner colleges throughout Central Florida. Recognized nationally as a model program, it gives students who can’t gain immediate admission to UCF — because of finances, family or job commitments, high school academic performance or other obstacles — the opportunity to demonstrate that they can succeed at the university level. Once they do, generous scholarship support for qualifying DirectConnect students brings a high-quality university education within reach.

By unlocking untapped human potential in populations that otherwise might not get the opportunity to realize it, such alternative pathways to success — which also include regional campuses for location-bound students, cutting-edge online and blended learning options, and special support programs for first-generation, transfer, minority and veteran students — can positively impact not just students and their families but also the entire region.

The first in her family to attend college, Cathy Gutierrez ’14 might not have made it to and through college via the traditional route. But thanks to the DirectConnect to UCF program and generous scholarship support, she was able to transfer from Valencia College to UCF, where she excelled, earning two bachelor’s degrees in different areas of microbiology. She’s now enrolled at Harvard Medical School, pursuing both an M.D. and a master’s degree in public health.

UCF urgently needs philanthropic support to reach more of these promising students, to better evaluate and meet their unique needs once they arrive on campus, and to help them afford tuition and living expenses while still concentrating on their studies.

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Fund NEED-BASED Scholarships

Providing a range of innovative pathways by which promising students can find success in the university environment is only part of the formula for unlocking human potential that might otherwise remain dormant. Those students also must find a means to afford their education.

Recent studies have shown that family income is a key predictor of graduation, even among students entering college with identical test scores and grades. Among highachieving students with SAT scores over 1200, for example, those from families earning incomes in the bottom 25 percent are only half as likely to graduate as those from higherincome families. For groups with lower test scores, the discrepancy is far worse.

That’s unacceptable. Not a single UCF student should have to quit before graduation simply because he or she can’t afford to stay in school.

The need is great. Even though UCF is widely recognized for value (The Princeton Review, Kiplinger’s and Forbes consistently rank us among America’s best college values, while fall 2016 marked our fourth consecutive year without a tuition increase), more than half of our 63,000 students qualify for financial aid.

Currently, we’re only able to meet about two-thirds of demonstrated need. Need-based scholarships, funded through contributions from alumni, friends and partners, can help close that gap, enabling promising students to pursue their dreams and aspirations while also helping reduce student debt and further strengthening UCF’s growing academic reputation.

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IGNITE Student success

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Attract the Best and Brightest

The high school GPAs and standardized test scores of incoming students have long been used as a factor in ranking American colleges and universities. Better students choose better schools, the thinking goes, so the higher the average GPA of the entering class, the more valuable the education offered by the institution.

Whether or not that’s entirely valid in today’s world, we can’t help but be proud of UCF’s steady climb in annual rankings like those published by U.S. News & World Report. Still, rankings aren’t the reason we seek to recruit the best and brightest students from Florida and beyond.

Instead, we want those students to come to UCF because we think we can offer them an education as valuable as any they’ll find. And because they strengthen the university’s academic reputation, helping to attract still more high-performing students as well as top faculty members. And because they enhance the academic environment for their fellow students. And because when they graduate from UCF, there’s a better chance they’ll live and work in Central Florida after graduation.

But attracting academic superstars to public universities isn’t easy. To compete for students who have the credentials for admission to the most elite colleges, institutions like UCF often must offer compelling incentives, most frequently in the form of scholarships.

We’re already able to recruit many of them. Universitywide, the average GPA for incoming first-year students in fall 2015 was 4.0, up from 3.92 the year before, while in The Burnett Honors College, it was an incredible 4.4. And in fall 2015, 277 National Merit Scholars were studying at UCF, second most among Florida’s public universities.

Private gifts to establish and fund prestigious, merit-based scholarships, though, will help us recruit many more high-achieving students by allowing admissions leaders the kind of flexibility that other kinds of financial aid may not offer.

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IGNITE Student success

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Enrich the University Experience

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At UCF, conventional coursework is only the beginning. Experiential learning, servicelearning and international study give students the chance to turn what they’ve been taught in classrooms and laboratories into the kind of experiences that shape their characters and their lives — often while helping others in profound ways.

We developed partnerships with the people there. We didn’t come just to give of ourselves; we came to learn too. It was great that we gave what we had, and they gave so much back.

— Industrial engineering major Daniel Washburn, after a service- learning trip to Nicaragua, where he and six other students spent nearly a month building a rainwater collection system at a remote mountain rehabilitation center

Through Community Nursing Coalitions, for example, teams of UCF nursing students have provided more than 30,000 hours of service across Central Florida, while the Knights Without Borders program sends student-athletes abroad to volunteer in developing regions. Students of all disciplines in The Burnett Honors College make yearly service-learning trips to South Africa and Nicaragua, and medical, nursing and engineering students tour the Dominican Republic on an annual medical mission.

Similar programs exist across the university, allowing students from all disciplines to serve, experience, learn, reflect and develop throughout Florida and around the world.

But not enough Knights are able to benefit from these irreplaceable experiences.

Traveling abroad is cost-prohibitive for many students, and even participating in local experiential and service-learning programs can be difficult for those with job obligations. Designing, administering and staffing such programs is often costly for the university too.

Private support of meaningful educational enrichment programs is a near-perfect example of the power of philanthropy to make a transformational impact at public universities like UCF, where funding for such experiences is often lacking. Likewise, helping students participate can very literally change the courses of their lives.

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Prepare Students for Rewarding Careers

It’s no surprise that for four straight years, UCF has been ranked among the top three Florida public universities when it comes to employment rates and wages of graduates. In fact, since its founding in 1963 as a source of engineers and scientists for the burgeoning space program, UCF has continued to focus on preparing students for successful careers.

More than 20,000 students each year gain valuable practical experience through co-ops, internships and other career-oriented learning experiences. The on-campus Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership encourages and supports enterprising students with resources like the Blackstone LaunchPad and StarterSpace “innovation sandbox” as well as competitions like the Joust New Venture Competition. Meanwhile, UCF’s Career Services office helps 30,000 students a year search and compete for jobs.

Jesse Wolfe ’15 took full advantage of UCF’s emphasis on preparing students for career success, participating in the Joust New Venture Competition, attending coaching sessions at the Blackstone LaunchPad and networking with other aspiring entrepreneurs in the Upstarts Student Venture Accelerator. It all paid off in 2015 on ABC’s Shark Tank, when Wolfe sold a 25 percent stake in his company, O’Dang Hummus, for $50,000. That deal led to another — this one with Publix, which now carries Wolfe’s salad dressings in all of its 1,106 locations.

And compete they do. According to Aviation Week magazine, the aerospace and defense industries recruit more graduates from UCF than any other university in the country, while numerous high-profile partners — Siemens, Duke Energy, NASA, Google, Texas Instruments, Microsoft and Lockheed Martin, to name a few — offer internship and co-op experiences that often lead to careers.

It’s not just science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) graduates who land jobs, though. Graduates in all disciplines are in high demand, thanks in part to the university’s focus on practical, hands-on education.

But there’s room for still more effective preparation of students for fruitful careers.

Philanthropic support of career services, career-oriented learning experiences, and oncampus entrepreneurship resources has both immediate and long-term benefits for UCF students and for the broader community in which they’ll build their successful futures.

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academic excellence

Priority: Academic Excellence $200 Million Research universities like UCF pursue two closely related objectives: to educate students and prepare them for lives of engagement and success, and to advance knowledge through scholarship and research, applying our discoveries and innovations to better our world.

Both are entirely dependent on faculty — the teacher-scholars who comprise the heart of the university — and on the technology, facilities and other resources they have at their disposal. At UCF, we are committed to fueling the academic enterprise by building a world-class faculty and providing them — and their students — with the resources they need to reach their full potential.

To that end, IGNITE seeks $200 million in philanthropic support for endowed faculty positions, research funding, technology and facilities improvements that will fuel the academic enterprise at UCF in four fundamental ways:

f Recruit and retain top teacher-scholars through prestigious endowed

professorships and deanships that serve as magnets for world-class faculty and academic leaders.

f Pursue breakthrough research in disciplines ranging from cancer treatment

to hospitality management and optical networks to public administration.

f Advance interdisciplinary solutions to pressing issues and challenges through

innovative approaches like the Faculty Cluster Initiative.

f Enhance teaching and learning by investing in next-generation technologies,

facilities and equipment.

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Recruit and Retain Top Teacher-Scholars

The very best faculty members not only make profound differences in the lives of their students but also positively impact their colleagues, their institutions and their communities. These outstanding teachers, scholars, researchers and practitioners make critical discoveries and deepen understanding through research and scholarship, demonstrate uncommon dedication to student learning, and lead and mentor their peers.

They are also aggressively recruited by well-funded colleges and universities across the country. To increase UCF’s competitive edge in faculty hiring, recognition and retention, we must create greater numbers of prestigious donor-endowed professorships and deanships. These positions — often named in honor or memory of a donor, colleague or family member — serve as valuable incentives that help recruit and retain exceptional professors from around the country and, increasingly, from around the globe.

Endowed chair and director of the DeVos Sport Business Management Program at UCF, Richard Lapchick is an internationally recognized human rights activist, pioneer for racial equality and expert on sports issues, often described as “the racial conscience of sport.” The DeVos program, which Lapchick has guided since 2001, has been named one of the top five of its kind in the nation by The New York Times, ESPN The Magazine and The Wall Street Journal, and Lapchick has been inducted into the Sports Hall of Fame of the Commonwealth of Nations in the humanitarian category, an honor he shares in common with Arthur Ashe and Nelson Mandela.

Endowed faculty positions help recruit world-class scholars like Lapchick and provide them with flexible funding to pursue their groundbreaking work.

Beyond recognizing individual excellence, endowed positions provide something just as attractive to top scholars: a permanent and flexible source of funding. In this fastpaced century, when startling scientific discoveries seem to happen on a weekly basis, the financial resources that accompany endowed positions enable faculty and other collegiate leaders to quickly pivot when promising new avenues of inquiry reveal themselves.

Giving to create endowed faculty positions doesn’t just help UCF build its ranks of highly sought-after professors and researchers. More broadly, philanthropy directed toward such positions bolsters the reputation of the entire institution. And because these positions are endowed in perpetuity, they immortalize excellence as it evolves over time, for all time.

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Pursue Breakthrough Research

Today, America’s colleges and universities perform the majority of the nation’s basic research — the kind of research that not only seeks medical and scientific breakthroughs but also yields discoveries that positively impact our daily lives and drive the innovation economy.

At UCF — designated a “highest research activity” institution by the Carnegie Foundation and ranked 18th in the nation among public universities for patents awarded — we conduct research of global significance in areas like computer science, alternative fuels, early cancer detection, stem cell technology and planetary sciences.

Child, family and community sciences professor Eleazar “Trey” Vasquez uses simulated learning environments to teach children with autism to interpret facial expressions. Difficulty reading subtle body language is a characteristic, to varying degrees, of the disorder that affects 1 in 68 American children. Vasquez’s innovative, cross-disciplinary approach could enable revolutionary advances in their lives. Young faculty members like Vasquez serve as inspiring teachers and mentors to undergraduate and graduate students, make lives better through their research, strengthen UCF’s academic reputation, and help to attract even more top-flight professors and researchers.

In the Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences, for example, cancer researcher Annette Khaled is working on innovative therapies and techniques — including using nanoparticles to hunt and kill cancer cells that travel to the brain, bones and lungs, causing deadly metastases.

Meanwhile, in the College of Sciences, marine biologist Kate Mansfield is making new discoveries about the mysterious lives of marine turtles. And at the Children’s Learning Clinic in the Department of Psychology, Mark Rapport made national headlines recently by showing that children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) actually learn better when they’re allowed to squirm and fidget — a discovery that has major implications for how parents and teachers can help all students reach their full potential.

Research is costly, though, and federal funding for basic research is declining. That makes private support for research initiatives more important than ever — a vital element in the work of UCF’s scientists, innovators and scholars as they pursue exciting, relevant lines of inquiry toward discoveries with the power to, quite simply, make the world a better place tomorrow than it is today.

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Advance Interdisciplinary Solutions

For nearly as long as universities have existed, they’ve been subdivided by academic discipline into colleges and departments. It’s an entirely reasonable structure with one glaring weakness: the pressing scientific and societal issues we face don’t conform to those neat divisions. Challenges like developing sustainable energy systems can be met only through massive interdisciplinary efforts.

That’s why UCF launched its Faculty Cluster Initiative in 2015 to foster the development of strong, diverse, interdisciplinary faculty teams that will leverage the university’s existing strengths to tackle specific challenges and opportunities.

Like so many of the challenges we face, increasing the portion of our electricity that comes from clean, renewable resources is far more complex than it first appears, requiring not just scientific and technological advances but also careful public policy and a nuanced understanding of complicated economic realities. UCF’s Resilient, Intelligent and Sustainable Energy Systems research cluster, led by Professor Zhihua Qu, seeks to integrate all three in a holistic effort to develop renewable energy resources (especially high-efficiency solar power systems); design smart, resilient grid systems for energy delivery; and craft the public policies and economic incentives that will play a vital role in facilitating adoption of the new technologies. Such interdisciplinary, solution-focused efforts promise resounding impact, which private philanthropy can dramatically amplify.

Precisely because they don’t conform to traditional structures — or traditional funding models — UCF faculty clusters urgently need private support. With an emphasis on purposefully addressing cross-disciplinary issues, rather than on advancing knowledge within a single field, their success requires the flexibility to recruit top-flight team members, respond quickly to new avenues of inquiry, and leverage cutting-edge equipment and facilities.

For the same reason, philanthropic support of the Faculty Clusters Initiative has the potential to create truly transformational impact. Existing clusters focus on a wide variety of areas, including cybersecurity, energy conversion and propulsion, genomics and bioinformatics, prosthetic interfaces, renewable energy systems and coastal ecosystems.

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Enhance Teaching and Learning

In an era when even preschoolers are computer literate, advancements in college-level teaching and learning technology and facilities aren’t gimmicks or distractions. They’re a necessary and powerful means to the worthwhile end of teaching students effectively and efficiently.

For example, a generation ago, nursing students learning to start an IV had to find a live volunteer to practice on — usually a classmate. If that wasn’t an option, they often practiced on oranges. Today, UCF nursing students practice on sophisticated simulators that instantaneously evaluate technique — not only saving a lot of unnecessary discomfort but also helping students master the skill more quickly.

In other cases, the advances are less apparent but no less transformational. In the UCF College of Engineering and Computer Science, for example, an unconventional new complex of four labs — a “maker space” that encourages creativity and freewheeling collaboration — served as the birthplace of Limbitless Solutions, the group of UCF students and graduates now known worldwide for producing low-cost bionic limbs for children.

Philanthropic gifts encourage faculty members to explore new classroom techniques, fund advanced learning technologies, and help build new campus facilities that optimize teaching, learning and student interaction — all of which have a direct and lasting impact on the quality of a UCF education.

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growth AND OPPORTUNITY

Priority: Growth and Opportunity $100 Million Central Florida is a special place, seasoned with a unique blend of ingredients.

Start with a synergistic set of industries, add a vibrant and diverse population, and top with near-perfect weather. It’s a recipe for remarkable growth. And if that recipe has a secret ingredient, it’s UCF.

Long known as America’s Partnership University, UCF has aligned itself with Central Florida from the beginning, playing an integral role in virtually every large-scale initiative to advance the region and improve the well-being of its citizens.

But UCF is more than a valuable partner. This university is also a pioneer — exploring bold ideas that often work first and best here, and then spread farther, impacting the lives of individuals, families and communities across Florida and around the world.

Now, through IGNITE, we seek philanthropic commitments of $100 million in order to help identify and maximize such opportunities to impact the larger community through partnerships and innovation. Among those we are currently pursuing are:

f Expand UCF’s presence in downtown Orlando, where nearly

8,000 students will pursue degree programs that align with emerging downtown industries.

f Develop innovative health care solutions by engaging in interdisciplinary

endeavors that leverage our existing strengths in medicine, nursing, bioengineering, simulation and more. f Conserve and protect ecosystems in Florida and beyond, with a particular focus on the complex challenges facing coastal systems in the coming century.

f Broaden UCF’s global footprint as well as its service to the international community in Central Florida by expanding study-abroad opportunities and attracting more international students, scholars and global partners.

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Expand UCF’s Presence IN DOWNTOWN ORLANDO

In addition to bringing nearly 8,000 students within walking distance of jobs and internships in numerous high-demand fields, UCF Downtown represents a further expansion of the university’s commitment to educational access and community service.

By partnering with Valencia College and targeting neighborhoods close to downtown, the new campus will create pathways to vocational training and two-year degrees from Valencia, as well as advanced degrees from UCF. But more than college students and their employers will benefit from UCF’s downtown campus. The project’s location adjacent to the historic Parramore community creates many more opportunities for engagement with the new PS-8 Parramore community school and other community-based organizations.

UCF Downtown is a striking example of an innovative and productive public-private partnership. Phase I of the project will include a 164,000-square-foot academic building to be shared by UCF and Valencia College students. The building’s approximate $60 million cost is being shared equally by the university, the state of Florida and private donors.

We invite IGNITE Campaign contributors to join us in making UCF Downtown a reality, whether in support of campus facilities, scholarships and other resources for downtown-based students, or initiatives designed to improve the lives and livelihoods of our Parramore neighbors.

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Develop Innovative Health Care Solutions

For physicians and other health care professionals, a fundamental diagnostic question is: “Why?” For students and faculty in UCF’s College of Medicine and College of Nursing, and for colleagues in other disciplines, the question is more often: “Why not?”

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In Iraq, we said that every day was a good day to die. Well, how about every day is not a good day to die? How about every day is a good day to live?

— former Spc. Bruce Chambers, who received PTSD treatment at UCF RESTORES, an on-campus clinic developing innovative and effective treatments for the disorder

Why not encourage a team of altruistic UCF engineering students to use 3-D printers to create low-cost, highly functional prosthetic arms for young people around the world?

Why not combine UCF’s expertise in virtual reality with the latest psychological insights to help treat veterans struggling with PTSD? Why not tap UCF’s Institute for Simulation and Training to help develop a state-of-theart Simulation Suite that allows College of Nursing students to gain essential skills in a safe yet realistic setting?

At UCF, where we’re educating the health care professionals of tomorrow, we know that creativity, flexibility and thinking beyond disciplinary boundaries are critically important skills — not only for treating individual patients but also for improving the health of our community as a whole.

Through the IGNITE Campaign, we seek philanthropic partners who see in those “why not?” questions enticing possibilities for improving 21st-century health care, whether through exciting new avenues of research or fruitful cross-campus collaboration.

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Conserve and Protect Ecosystems

With greater Orlando’s population at 2.3 million and growing fast, infrastructure challenges are inevitable, but standard solutions needn’t be. Population growth presents opportunities to think differently about how millions of people power their homes, access a safe and reliable water supply, transport themselves around the region, and enjoy clean and green surroundings — all in the context of a desire to conserve and protect Florida’s ecosystems.

Photo taken as part of permitted sea turtle research conducted by the UCF Marine Turtle Research Group.

Among the most sensitive and important of these ecosystems are our world-renowned coastlines. At UCF, an interdisciplinary coalition of biologists, chemists, engineers, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, emergency managers and others is working to understand the coastal zone as an ecological-social-economic system. The solutions they uncover through this approach have the potential to positively impact not only coastal ecosystems worldwide but also the 3 billion people who live within 100 miles of a coast.

Elsewhere, thinking anew about environmentally friendly approaches to life in Central Florida and far beyond drives the work of multiple centers and institutes at UCF. Research efforts in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Construction Engineering, for example, focus on novel ways to curb stormwater runoff and maintain drinking-water quality, while in the Department of Biology’s Science and Planning in Conservation Ecology (SPICE) Lab, researchers examine issues ranging from the impacts of road and animal crossings to the effects of sea level change on biodiversity.

For contributors with a passion for the environment, the IGNITE Campaign offers numerous opportunities to partner with UCF in supporting these initiatives and more.

Whether your ecological interest is in Florida’s flora, fauna or fellow humans, UCF can serve as the conduit to a more sustainable future. .

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IGNITE growth AND Opportunity

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Broaden UCF’s Global Footprint

It’s a big world out there. And it’s a world represented in a big way on campus and throughout greater Orlando. Increasingly, UCF’s student body mirrors the globe, with nearly 2,300 international students from more than 120 countries.

The university’s Global UCF division, headquartered in a new building on Memory Mall, is the university’s primary hub for all things international. In addition to growing the number of high-impact international experiences undertaken by UCF faculty and staff, IAGS seeks to make UCF the Florida university of choice for international students, scholars and global partners.

Every summer, an interdisciplinary team of UCF medical, nursing and engineering students spends a week rendering badly needed care, counseling and aid in some of the Dominican Republic’s most impoverished villages. It’s an experience that teaches things that can’t be learned in a classroom or lab, things that can and do change the trajectory of these students’ lives. Private philanthropy helps many of them afford the trip.

Expanding UCF’s global footprint, as well as its services to the international community in Central Florida, requires resources beyond the scope of yearly budgets. Gifts through the IGNITE Campaign for study-abroad scholarships can bring transformative international experiences within reach of many more UCF students.

Support of UCF college-based international initiatives, such as the College of Business Administration’s Global Advantage Program, can enhance educational offerings and help defray expenses. With your help, UCF can extend its global reach and its impact on the students who will make tomorrow’s world their home.

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WAYS OF GIVING

Make an Enduring Impact As a comprehensive, campuswide campaign, IGNITE offers innumerable opportunities for involvement and support. From athletics to the arts, environmental initiatives to endowed chairs, and scholarships to service-learning, donors can create positive impact at UCF in the ways that are closest to their hearts.

While sizeable gifts can move the campaign more quickly toward successful completion, all gifts, regardless of size, will combine with support from other alumni and friends to form a critical mass of support, primed to power UCF forward.

Campaign gifts may be made for one or more purposes:

f Gifts for current operations provide immediate support for UCF’s most pressing

needs and may be directed to your chosen college or program, including intercollegiate athletics.

f Gifts to help build, renovate or equip facilities ensure that students and faculty

have access to state-of-the-art learning and research environments and that our intercollegiate athletes train and compete in top-notch facilities.

f Gifts to permanent endowment create sources of philanthropic support to sustain

UCF over time. Endowment gifts are invested by the UCF Foundation, and a portion of the annual income is allocated for the purpose specified by the donor, in perpetuity.

Likewise, gifts may take one or more forms, including:

f Outright gifts, generally made in the form of cash or securities

f Multiyear pledges, generally fulfilled over a period of up to five years

f Planned gifts, including provisions in wills or trusts and life-income arrangements

For donors who are able to make exceptionally generous campaign commitments, special recognition opportunities offer ways to permanently link the contributor’s name with essential resources such as state-of-the-art facilities, vital programs, prestigious endowed faculty positions, undergraduate student scholarships and graduate fellowships.

We encourage you to speak with one of our dedicated and knowledgeable development professionals to explore the many ways you can make an enduring impact at UCF. 29

F IGNITE

A Call to Action Strictly in terms of dollars, private philanthropy constitutes only a small portion of the funding that sustains public universities like UCF. But the fact is that not all dollars are the same. Think of your support as a catalyst that triggers a larger reaction. An additive that changes the whole equation. A spark that ignites the rocket’s engines.

Revenue from tuition, state funding and other sources allows UCF to successfully fulfill its mission as a major metropolitan research university of global impact. That’s not what IGNITE is about. Rather, IGNITE is about transformational change. At a pivotal moment in our history, we are poised to emerge as a new kind of university, a progressive disrupter of higher education in America, a new model of 21st-century higher education.

That takes more than tuition and state funding dollars.

It takes an unprecedented commitment not only from university leaders, staff and faculty, but also from our alumni, friends, partners and community.

It takes private support, which, unlike other kinds of funding, gives every deserving student an opportunity to fulfill his or her potential, empowers academic leaders to compete for the best faculty in the world, enables researchers to pivot quickly toward new lines of inquiry, and allows the university to innovate beyond traditional ideas about higher education.

It takes believing that by working together we can achieve anything.

It takes a spark.

It takes you.

Please join us.

31

IGNITE Campaign cabinet Richard J. Walsh ’77 ’83MS Chair, IGNITE: The Campaign for UCF Nelson J. Marchioli ’72 Chair, UCF Foundation Board of Directors Phyllis A. Klock Lawrence J. Chastang ’80 Michael J. Grindstaff ’78 Allen R. Weiss ’76 Honorary Member Michael J. Morsberger, Ex Officio Vice President for Advancement and CEO, UCF Foundation The Next Step For more information about IGNITE: The Campaign for UCF, please contact Mike Morsberger, Vice President for Advancement and CEO of the UCF Foundation, or any member of the UCF Advancement team.

Advancement | UCF Foundation, Inc. 12424 Research Parkway, Suite 250 Orlando, Florida 32826-3208 407.882.1220 igniteucf.org

The UCF Foundation encourages, stewards and celebrates charitable contributions from alumni and friends to support the University of Central Florida.

Advancement | UCF Foundation, Inc.

12424 Research Parkway, Suite 250

| Orlando, Florida 32826-3208 | 407.882.1220 | igniteucf.org

UCF Foundation, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.