The Board of Visitors’ Advancement Committee met Friday and reported that the University has secured nearly $510 million in fundraising commitments for the 2026 fiscal year, putting the University on track with its five-year average, excluding last year's fiscal year. The Committee also reflected on projects to centralize and optimize the procedures for alumni donation collection and heard from the LaCross family, who discussed their $43 million donation to the School of Education and Human Development to establish a new early learning center.
The Advancement Committee is a standing committee within the Board that is responsible for all matters regarding University development, alumni affairs and public communications. The Committee is also responsible for all capital campaigns and branding efforts that promote the University to alumni and friends of the University.
According to Advancement Committee Chair Evans Poston Jr., the University is on track with its five-year funding average excluding last year’s funding achievements which Poston described as “an outlier year” — due to the year’s recognition of gifts from the Honor the Future campaign.
The Honor the Future campaign took place from 2019-2025, and it raised over $6 billion for the University to support projects including the Edgar Shannon Library renovation, the Contemplative Commons and the School of Data Science.
Of the over $500 million in financial commitments, $425 million of the funding has been in cash form — meaning it is funding that has already “come in the door,” Poston said. He also reported that the cash flow number is up 8 percent year-over-year and up 20 percent from the five-year average.
Poston also said that this fiscal year, the University has received just under 95 donations that each total over $1 million and expects they will be able to achieve over 100 by the end of the fiscal year.
“[We have a] very generous alumni base [and a] very hard working team,” Poston said. “We're deeply thankful for all that ... even though the [Honor the Future] campaign officially ended last summer, it has not slowed down.”
According to Poston, the Committee hosted about 850 events this past year, many of which included efforts to expand University President Scott Beardsley’s outreach to alumni and friends of the University.
Another major topic of discussion at the meeting was a recent gift of over $43 million by College Class of 1976 alumna Kathleen LaCross and McIntire Class of 1974 alumnus and Darden Class of 1978 alumnus David LaCross. The LaCrosses have donated previously to the University, most notably accruing over $100 million in donations to the Darden School of Business — the largest donation in Darden history.
According to Beardsley, the $43 million donation to the University is being directed to the School of Education and Human Development to allow the University to build an early learning center in the Kindlewood neighborhood of Charlottesville.
Beardsley noted that Kathleen LaCross has been particularly active in childhood education after graduating from the University with a degree in psychology.
Following Beardsley's remarks, Stephanie Rowley, dean of the School of Education and Human Development, discussed how this project will improve access to critical early childhood education for underserved areas in the Charlottesville community while allowing students at the University to gain teaching experience.
“Beyond the life-changing care that this gift will facilitate, it will create opportunities for our students to engage directly in hands-on learning, and for our faculty to bring research into practice in ways that will strengthen outcomes for children and families,” Rowley said.
According to Kathleen LaCross, this investment aims to support an education sector that is typically underfunded due to the majority of educational resources being directed at K-12 education. She said she believes early childhood education in the years leading up to Kindergarten is the most important period for education and can set students up for success.
“We continue to hear about the depressing gaps in reading and writing ability. We hear about so many children aren't ready for Kindergarten when they turn five,” Kathleen LaCross said. “These children, in most cases, are going to struggle throughout the remaining years in school, and in so many cases, for the rest of their lives.”
Kathleen LaCross said that the center will also serve as a professional development site for residents of the Kindlewood housing project to gain job experience to become skilled caregivers and educators to young children.
Lastly, the Committee discussed a decade-long effort to centralize payment collection and donation systems from across Grounds to decrease the number of errors in payment collection and improve the experience for donors to the University.
According to Julie Featherstone, senior associate vice president for external relations, the University had over 120 different tools for gift collection across Grounds when she began in 2016. In some cases, she said the University was paying the same vendor two or three times in different departments for the same software.
Featherstone also reported that there were a plethora of errors due to the wide scope of tools being used to contact alumni, store data and process payments. As examples, she said 75 percent of the emails to donors were being deleted, some donors were receiving over 600 emails a year from the University and one in 10 payments had an error to be resolved.
“Over the past 10 years, we have improved, updated and replaced nearly every policy, process and technology platform that supports advancement at U.Va., some of them more than once,” Featherstone said. “This presentation is as much about collaborative change leadership, the type of leadership that is necessary to make transformational changes at U.Va., as it is about the improvements that we've made.”
Featherstone said that after a decade's worth of work, the University has narrowed down the number of software platforms they utilize from more than 120 to 12, and it has decreased the number of errors that occur during alumni outreach and donation collection procedures. She reported that specifically, the transaction error rate now only produces 64 errors per 135,000 transactions — a figure that is 95 percent lower or 20 times better than the industry standard.
Other Board meetings that took place during the most recent June session can be read on The Cavalier Daily’s website. The Advancement Committee is scheduled to meet next during the meetings of the Board Sept. 16-19.
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