Having achieved a $250-million overall goal two years ahead of schedule, the Board of Trustees of DePaul University has voted to increase the goal of its comprehensive fundraising campaign to $300 million.

The Many Dreams, One Mission Campaign for DePaul University will continue through its scheduled conclusion in 2014 with a special focus on fulfilling a $100 million goal for scholarships and raising funds for the construction of new facilities for the university’s renowned music and theatre schools, campaign leaders said.

“This ambitious campaign has achieved success and great momentum due to the energy and generosity of our alumni and friends, who have recognized in historic numbers the value of DePaul’s mission to furnish an excellent education to students from a broad range of backgrounds,” said Jim Jenness, chair of the university’s Board of Trustees.

Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, C.M., president of DePaul, said, “The heart of our campaign aims to maximize the investment in our mission: scholarships, facilities, faculty and programs that all deliver on our promise of excellence and serving the underserved.”

Campaign leaders said they would focus on the largest and most ambitious component goal of the campaign, a $100-million scholarship target. Progress toward that goal stood at $75 million as of mid-June.

Jenness said that the scholarship goal is particularly important for DePaul, which has a strong history of inclusion as a path to upward economic and educational mobility for talented students.

“For generations, DePaul has been a beacon of excellence and opportunity for students from all socioeconomic backgrounds,” Jenness said. “This campaign is about one generation helping the next, about making sure that future generations can realize their dreams, fulfill their ambitions and serve their communities.”

A Transformative Campaign

Gifts to the campaign—the most ambitious in the 114-year history of DePaul—have surpassed all records at the school.  Forty-two seven-figure gifts have been received during the campaign—compared to 26 in the years since DePaul’s founding in 1898 to the start of this campaign.  FY 2012 will be the largest fundraising year in the university’s history, and with more than 29,000 individuals making gifts to the campaign, alumni engagement and support has increased markedly. Sixty-six percent of the 29,000 campaign donors are alumni (20,000 out of 29,000). Sixty-one percent of dollars raised has come from individuals ($157 million out of $257 million).

The campaign is already having a huge impact across the university.  Gifts have created more than 200 new endowed or expendable scholarship funds, established new endowed faculty positions and bolstered faculty and programs support across the university.

In addition to building scholarship resources and bolstering academic excellence, the campaign is helping to transform the school’s Lincoln Park Campus.  Early gifts to the campaign enabled the construction of the Monsignor Andrew McGowan Science Center, a state-of-the-art science education and research facility that houses DePaul’s new College of Science and Health.  The university broke ground last year on a new Theatre School complex at the corner of Fullerton and Racine, and work is scheduled to begin on a new home for the School of Music in 2013.

A momentous $30-million gift from Chicago investment pioneer and DePaul alumnus Richard Driehaus will support faculty positions and research at the university’s business school, which will be formally re-named the Richard H. Driehaus College of Business this fall.  The Driehaus commitment, along with a $10-million anonymous gift last December, contributed to the early achievement of the goal and convinced campaign leadership of the potential and importance of further fundraising to fulfill the commitments set at the outset of the campaign.

“Building academic excellence and assuring that a DePaul education remains affordable for the broadest range of talented students is our ongoing mission and has been the focus of this campaign,” said Jenness. “We are confident that our community recognizes the importance of this mission and will continue to step up and make difference in the lives of students.”