Campaign Emory is a $1.6 billion fund-raising effort—the most ambitious in Emory’s history and the largest ever undertaken in Georgia. Slightly more than half of the $1.6 billion goal has already been raised. Three years ago, beginning September 2005, Emory started counting gifts and commitments as part of the campaign goal, as is customary.
Total raised to date: $989 million (as of October 31, 2009)
The public phase of Campaign Emory began in September 2008. Emory has until December 31, 2012, to meet its goal. To remain competitive and to continue offering great value to society, universities continually seek private support.
Campaign Emory is designed to advance Emory’s strong faculty and students, create and bolster innovative programs, enable cutting-edge research, and build facilities to provide the best educational, research, and patient-care environments possible.
Gifts to Campaign Emory fuel the University’s strategic plan. The result of 18 months of work by more than 1,000 alumni, faculty, and staff, this bold plan will strengthen Emory's ability to reach out to more communities, develop leaders, and apply talents and resources to a growing number of challenges.
Campaign funding priorities for every school, unit, and program of the University support the plan’s goals, which include recruiting and retaining the best faculty, preparing students for lives of leadership and community service, caring for the environment, connecting scholarship to real-world concerns outside the campus gates, resolving conflict, exploring new frontiers in science and technology, and improving health.
Campaign Emory will transform all of Emory’s nine undergraduate and graduate schools and the University’s major operating units, including Emory Libraries, the Michael C. Carlos Museum, the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, and Emory Hospitals and The Emory Clinic. Along with Emory's other owned and affiliated facilities, Emory Hospitals and The Emory Clinic are part of the largest and most comprehensive health care system in Georgia.
Of Emory's $1.6 billion goal, a significant portion will increase the endowment, which generates funding in perpetuity throughout the University. The remainder will provide expendable resources to support priorities in specific schools, in multidisciplinary programs, and in the University as a whole.
One of the campaign’s leading priorities is Emory Advantage, a progressive financial aid initiative to eliminate or cap need-based debt for families with incomes of $100,000 or less. This program makes it possible for any qualified student to earn an Emory education and helps to foster an economically and culturally diverse community of scholars.
The campaign seeks to raise awareness of the education, research, and community involvement taking place at Emory, which perennially ranks in the top 20 national universities as rated in U.S. News & World Report.
With key partners such as The Carter Center, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Georgia Tech, Emory is working on major multidisciplinary initiatives in global health, predictive health, the neurosciences, computational life sciences, creativity and the arts, sustainability, policy solutions, cancer research and treatment, race and difference, and religions and the human spirit.
Emory has a long list of “firsts” and “mosts.” Campaign Emory focuses on “musts.” Among them are these:
• We must do more of the work that has given the world the most widely prescribed drugs for AIDS
and the most promising current candidate for an AIDS vaccine.
• We must further our advancement as the leading private research university in the Deep South.
• We must sustain one of the world’s largest and finest aggregations of scholars in religious studies.
• We must create a home for one of the major literary archives in North America.
• We must continue to strengthen our top 10 school of public health and prestigious schools
of medicine, nursing, business, law, and theology, along with one of the hottest tickets in
undergraduate education.
• We must continue to provide the most advanced patient care based on the latest science.
Emory is an indispensable asset to Atlanta and the state, just like Harvard is to Cambridge and Boston, like Vanderbilt is to Nashville, like Johns Hopkins is to Baltimore. Considering the brainpower, employment base, and billions of dollars in research funding and economic activity generated by these idea factories, it’s not farfetched to say that—in a knowledge economy—these great universities are like Fortune 100 corporations working day and night for the quality of life and economic well-being of the regions they call home.
Walter M. “Sonny” Deriso Jr., a 1968 Emory College graduate and a 1972 Emory Law graduate, chairs Campaign Emory. Elected as an alumni trustee in 2002, he is the chairman of Atlantic Capital Bank in Atlanta.
