Tag Archives: endowment

A New Year and a New Campaign Milestone

Happy New Year! As the new year and new semester begin, I want to update you on our Great Returns campaign.

In the last month of 2020, the Augsburg Community’s generosity continued to thrive despite the challenges of this past year. In fact, on the last day of the 2020, Augsburg received nearly 400 gifts totaling about $500,000. I am inspired by the commitment of the Augsburg community to ensure our students thrive. This outpouring of philanthropy has aided us in reaching a new milestone in our fundraising effort to build the Augsburg endowment. We now have raised more than $63 million in gifts and pledges!

We have also reached a new milestone in our student scholarship efforts. As part of the Great Returns campaign, we set an ambitious goal of securing 150 new scholarships in honor of the 150th anniversary of Augsburg’s founding. As of January 1, 2021, benefactors have established 97 new scholarships which make an Augsburg education possible for more students.

As we celebrate these milestones, I would like to lift up a few stories of generous benefactors.

While this has been an extraordinarily challenging year, I wanted you to know that the generosity of the Augsburg community has continued to change lives in powerful ways. I am grateful to everyone who chooses to share their gifts with Augsburg and look forward to a time when we can celebrate this generosity in person.  

Warmly,
Paul S. Mueller, M.D. ’84
Chair of Great Returns: Augsburg’s Sesquicentennial Campaign

New Campaign Milestone in Drive to Build Augsburg Endowment

We are happy to share that Great Returns: Augsburg’s Sesquicentennial Campaign has hit a new milestone in our fundraising effort to build the Augsburg endowment. Thanks to the generosity of Regents, alumni, parents, and friends we have more than $56 million in gifts and pledges. Although we are still in the early stage of this effort, the response is remarkable. The commitments of our closest donors already make this the largest campaign in our history. We expect to continue with our early stage fundraising through 2020. This is the time for donors who care deeply about our mission to make the initial commitments that set the pace for the broader campaign.

Augsburg Endowed Scholarship Donors Jeff ’77 and Becky ’79 Nodland

This week we announced a new endowed scholarship for music from Jeff ’77 and Becky ’79 Nodland. Jeff is a longtime leader on the Board of Regents, both serve on the President’s Council and are active alumni volunteers including their role as chairs of the 2021 All-School Reunion, they are Augsburg parents, and Becky serves on the Music Advisory Board. It has been a pleasure to work with them on a number of fundraising efforts. Hope you will take a moment to read about their gift here.

Heather Riddle
Vice President for Alumni Relations and Advancement

Thank You

We are so grateful that you continue to champion Augsburg’s mission with your philanthropy. Your generosity makes a difference and doesn’t go unnoticed.

Money Magazine Ranking

Your support and the support of all of our donors makes Augsburg a distinct university. For example, a few weeks ago Augsburg was named a “most transformative college” by Money Magazine. We are the only school in Minnesota on their list of 50. You can see the full list here. Money Magazine shares that “It’s not surprising that elite schools report high graduation rates or alumni success. What’s impressive is when students beat the odds by doing better than would be expected from their academic and economic backgrounds. We call this a college’s value add. For this list, we ranked colleges based on our exclusive value-added scores for graduation rates, earnings, and student loan repayment, eliminating schools with below-average scores.”

Below you’ll see my mobile number and email address. Please feel free to text, call, or email me if I can be helpful to you in any way.

Sincerely,

Heather Riddle

Vice President for Advancement, Augsburg University

mobile: 651-283-7949

riddle@augsburg.edu

Investing Our Endowment for Great Returns

As Campaign Chair for Great Returns: Augsburg’s Sesquicentennial Campaign, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting with alumni, parents, and friends of the University to discuss the ways in which we can carry Augsburg’s mission into the future. On a recent trip to Florida, I met with regent emeritus Dan Anderson ‘65, who shared about his time on the Board of Regents with me.

While Dan was serving on the Board, he chaired a committee that looked into how we invest our Augsburg endowment. Compared to many private colleges, our endowment is relatively small. Dan and the committee had four goals:

  1. Understand the history of the endowment at Augsburg;
  2. Begin preliminary determinations about the role endowment should play in achieving our mission and strategies;
  3. Determine how endowment growth strategies should be incorporated into and aligned with other fundraising priorities; and
  4. Recommend an endowment growth goal and strategies that will bring Augsburg more in line with peer institutions.

Dan also shared with me the current strategy for investing Augsburg’s endowment in Commonfund, a nonprofit organization started by the Ford Foundation to help other nonprofits manage their endowment and pension funds.

Dan said, “Based on the recommendation of the Investment Committee, the Augsburg Board hired Commonfund in 2008 to provide cost effective advice relating to developing an Investment Policy Statement, to help select high profile asset managers over a wide range of asset classes to implement the asset allocation strategy called for, and to monitor the performance of these managers and provide quarterly reporting on their results.”

Through our work with Commonfund, I believe Augsburg has found a much savvier way to invest that can start to compete with schools who have the luxury of a much larger endowment.

Here’s a quick snapshot of our investments over the last few years:


In her work as chair of the Audit Committee and vice chair of the Finance Committee of the Board of Regents, Karen (Miller) Durant ‘81 has provided expert advice on Augsburg’s current investments for the endowment. Karen has been an Augsburg Regent since 2011 and has recently retired from a distinguished career in business, most recently as Vice President and Controller of Tennant Company.

“After seeing the higher level of philanthropy related to the new Center for Science, Business & Religion building, I knew focusing on increasing our endowment was the right next step,” Karen said. “Investing in our endowment, especially unrestricted cash giving, benefits Augsburg’s overall financial position. We are seeing momentum from this new Great Returns campaign that will support Augsburg’s mission and I’m completely comfortable and confident that the University will use the money in the most effective way for years to come.”

I appreciate Dan’s and Karen’s leadership and for taking the time to share this information with me. I have great confidence in the way our endowment is managed.

To learn more about how our endowment was initially established, I turned to Kristin Anderson, Augsburg’s archivist and professor of art history, who was helpful in providing a historical perspective. As with much of Augsburg’s history, she says this is a complicated issue. After a number of years of financial difficulties, Sven Oftedal started a fundraising campaign in 1877-78. It was successful, but only temporarily, and so there was an additional project to raise more money for an endowment fund. This project was approved by the Conference (the church body affiliated with Augsburg, and for which Augsburg was the seminary) in 1880. By 1882, when the campaign ended, the committee had cash and pledges of more than $50,000. (Read Carl Chrislock’s history of Augsburg, From Fjord to Freeway, for more information.) The endowment did not belong to Augsburg, but to the Conference, and so it was tangled up in the synodical mergers and lawsuits of the 1890s.

Kristin says that $50,000 was released by Augsburg and they had to restart the endowment later. She cites Chrislock again on the topic: “The 1898 settlement balanced one major concession to the Augsburg party with two less important ones to the United Church. The latter yielded title to all Augsburg Seminary real estate, both land and buildings, thereby placing the campus under the uncontested ownership of Oftedal’s corporation. In return, the Augsburg board surrendered claim to the endowment fund contributed by the Conference at the time of the union, an asset estimated to be worth approximately $49,000, that Augsburg had controlled and utilized since 1890.”

This is the same fund that Oftedal created a decade earlier, the fundraising for which was largely accomplished by Oftedal and others at Augsburg. It was, after all, created to provide ongoing support for Augsburg. Eventually, the endowment was restarted as the endowment fund we see today.

I hope you also found this information helpful in understanding Augsburg’s tireless mission to invest in our students and create a place for education that is defined by excellence in the liberal arts and professional studies that will last for generations to come. Thank you for your continued attention to our drive to build Augsburg’s endowment in Great Returns: Augsburg’s Sesquicentennial Campaign.

These are exciting times for Augsburg! Please keep the University and its students, faculty, and staff in your thoughts and prayers. If you would like to have a gift conversation or have any questions about the campaign, please reach out to me (muellerp@augsburg.edu) or Vice President for Advancement Heather Riddle (riddle@augsburg.edu).

Warmly,

Paul S. Mueller, M.D. ’84

Chair of Great Returns: Augsburg’s Sesquicentennial Campaign

Campaign Milestone: $40 Million Raised

$40,000,000 thermometerThere is much to be grateful for and I want to share some good news with you today! Recently, Augsburg reached the significant milestone of $40 million in gifts and pledges toward Great Returns: Augsburg’s Sesquicentennial Campaign. Generous commitments from alumni, parents, and friends have already created 51 new endowed scholarships and three endowed professorships.

The story behind each gift is inspiring to me. Recently, I read about Tom Peterson ’69 who honors his father by contributing regularly to the Clifford A. Peterson Scholarship Endowment Fund so that students in the business program can receive financial aid to significantly offset their educational costs. Donors like Tom are the cornerstone of this campaign.

Peterson’s  insight on the importance of growing Augsburg’s endowment was recently featured as a gift announcement story:

“A small scholarship throws off enough to buy books. I would like to get to where I can make a material dent in someone’s tuition,” Tom Peterson says. Currently, a $1,000,000 endowment provides enough to cover one student’s full scholarship (tuition plus room and board) each year.

I look forward to working with the growing number of campaign insiders like Tom Peterson who choose to invest in the future of Augsburg.

The Board of Regents and President Paul Pribbenow expect to focus on fundraising for endowment through Augsburg’s sesquicentennial year (2019-20). Regular updates on campaign progress, including gift announcements, will be available on the Great Returns blog.

Warmly,

Paul S. Mueller, M.D. ’84
Chair of Great Returns: Augsburg’s Sesquicentennial Campaign

Augsburg Announces Goal for 150 New Scholarships

When a water droplet hits the surface of a pond, it causes a ripple effect that spreads across the pond’s surface. That’s how my dear wife and Augsburg Regent Nancy (Mackey ’85) Mueller sees the effect a gift to the Augsburg endowment can have on the University’s future. 

On Saturday, Nov. 17, Augsburg hosted a brunch to thank scholarship donors who have given generously to Great Returns: Augsburg’s Sesquicentennial Campaign and to announce the ambitious goal of securing 150 new scholarships in honor of the 150th anniversary of the University’s founding.

As of mid-November, 65 new scholarships have been established toward this goal. During the brunch, donors were recognized with a special gift—a hand-blown glass water droplet. Each glass water droplet is one of a kind and has been signed and numbered by the artist. These small works of art symbolize the impact each benefactor has and will have on the lives of Augsburg students today and in the future.

As President Pribbenow said at Saturday’s brunch, “Your generosity is life-giving and sustaining. Your support ripples out to touch the lives of students for generations to come. It also ripples out to inspire other donors.”

These scholarships play a key role in the Great Returns campaign as they increase our endowment and make Augsburg more accessible to students. We are pleased to report the campaign reached $36 million in October and continues to grow through the philanthropy of the amazing Augsburg community.

Scholarship Donor Brunch

A special thank you to the following people who have given a scholarship so far:

Allen ’65 and Joyce Anderson
Shelby (Gimse) Andress ’56
Anonymous (2)
D. Scott and Meg Bassinson
Lola (Lidstrom) Berg ’50
Barbara and Zane Birky
Eric Browning-Larsen ’75
Barry ’89 MAL and Cynthia Carlson
Jason and Camilla Chan
Judith A. Christensen
Jerelyn (Hovland) ’63 and Clyde Cobb
Deborah (Fredrickson) ’76 and Bill Crowley
George ’72 and Janet Dahlman
Lars ’97 and Mocha (Holmgren) ’97 Dyrud
David and Edith Egertson
John ’82 and Joan Evans
Barbara and Edwin Gage
Linda Giacomo
Frank ’96 and Rebecca Grazzini
Sharon (Hendrickson) ’67 and Karl Gronberg
Corinne (Tandberg) and John Haglund
Karen (Jacobson) ’67 and David ’67 Haugen
John ’70 and Lynn (Benson) ’69 Hjelmeland
Kenneth ’74 and Linda (Bailey) ’74 Holmen
Bradley ’63 and Linda Holt
Marlene (Chan) ’74 and Shi-wah Hui
Diane and Paul Jacobson
Katherine ’81, ’16 MAE and James Johnson
Wayne ’71 and Carol (Pederson) ’72 Jorgenson
Dr. Rachel (Hendrickson) ’71 and Dr. Bruce Julian
Karen Kaivola and Bonnie Tensen
Karina Karlén ’83
Bruce and Maren Kleven
David and Barbara Kleven
Dean ’77 and Susan Kopperud
Kathryn Lange ’72 and Dennis Sonifer
Diane and Philip Larson
Jean Lingen
Frank ’65 and Beatrice Livingston
Carol (Torstenson) ’65 and Allan McCausland
Donna Demler McLean
Patricia McNevin ’90
Peter Mitchelson and Judith Henderson
Lori Moline ’82 and Steven Olson
Marlys (Backlund) Morland ’54
Sharon (Lindell) Mortrud ’64
Patricia (Larson) Moylan ’57
Paul ’84 and Nancy (Mackey) ’85 Mueller
James ’67 and Shirley Norman
Kristine (Peterson) Pearson ’78
Miriam (Cox) ’68 and Ronald Peterson
Thomas Peterson ’69
Philip Jr. and Margaret Rowberg
John ’77 and Jane Sandness
Douglas and Grace Schroeder Scott
Earl ’68 and Lisbeth (Jorgensen) ’70 Sethre
Grace (Kemmer) Sulerud ’58
Lisa Svac Hawks ’85
Nicolas Thomley ’06 MBA
Harold and Maureen Thompson
Sharon L. Upton ’79
Deborah (Lease) ’78 and Douglas Wagman
Katharine Watson
David Wattman ’77 and James Karason ’78
John Welckle ’57
Craig Wisness ’73
Marjorie (Chan) Wong ’79
John ’74 and Marvel Yager
Marlys Yu

Investing in students: Building a lasting legacy

“I was the first person on both sides of the family not to go to Augsburg,” said Phil Formo with a smile. “My mother met my father in chemistry class there. She was in nursing and needed help with it, and he was good in chemistry. They also both sang in the first Augsburg choir concert that ever took place, after the men’s chorus and the women’s chorus merged.”

Phil’s parents, Jerome and Winifred, both class of 1937, were extremely dedicated to Augsburg and stayed deeply involved in all things Auggie throughout their lifetimes. Jerome served as a Regent in the late 60s, was active as a Regent Emeritus, and also was awarded a Distinguished Alumni Award in 1983.

“Seeing the way our giving has led to a better future for so many students inspires us to do more.”

Phil reports it was an easy choice to designate proceeds from his parents’ estate in 2009 to establish the Jerome and Winifred Formo Scholarship for music majors or those with a strong interest in choral music directing. More than eight students have benefited from this endowed fund, but it was not the first Formo scholarship. That distinction belongs to the David J. Formo Scholarship, which was established in 1979 and is awarded annually to a junior or senior student who has successfully overcome adversity to achieve academic and extracurricular excellence.

Phil reports it made great sense to make gifts to support endowed scholarships at Augsburg. His parents demonstrated the power generosity as a way to remember their son and Phil’s brother and carry on his legacy.

“Seeing the way our giving has led to a better future for so many students inspires us to do more. It’s great to meet the scholarship recipients and hear their stories. We’re thrilled each time we hear the influence the scholarship has had on their lives and their ability to attend Augsburg. It’s very satisfying.”

For a short video that tells more about the Formo scholarships and to view other videos, visit here: https://vimeo.com/augsburgu 

Contact Heather Riddle, Vice President for Advancement, at 612-330-1177 or riddle@augsburg.edu for more information on scholarships and ways to give to Great Returns: Augsburg’s Sesquicentennial Campaign.