"Jay Davenport" Archive

Campaign Director Jay Davenport: What's next for Wake Will

Jay Davenport, Assistant Vice President of Development, Wake Forest University, Monday, March 19, 2012.

Jay Davenport is the associate vice president and campaign director for Wake Forest’s Office of University Advancement. Below he addresses some questions about the recent announcement that Wake Will has raised half a billion dollars in total commitments, an important milestone in the campaign that represents more than 83 percent toward the overall goal for the Reynolda Campus.

Q: Wake Will has surpassed the half-billion dollar mark in commitments a full two years ahead of schedule. What kind of impact has Wake Will had at Wake Forest already, and what does this milestone mean for the remainder of the campaign?

A: The Wake Forest community’s response to this campaign has been overwhelmingly positive.

In my experience, it is uncommon to see capital campaigns hit these kinds of milestones as early as Wake Will has raised half a billion dollars. I attribute this remarkable success to our alumni and parents’ genuine interest in Dr. Hatch’s vision for the future of the University, as well as a desire to see our investments in the academic deans’ visions come to life.

The biggest impacts we see today are the direct investment in our faculty, in the academic enterprise, in our student scholarships and student athletes on campus. Gifts through Wake Will are establishing new faculty chairs, new accounts for department funds and our academic endeavors, and we have raised $154 million for existing and new scholarships that benefit students who are on campus today. That is really exciting, and yet we know there’s still much work to be done.

Going forward, our team will emphasize for our alumni, parents and friends the importance of supporting our academic departments and making direct investments to create endowments for those departments. Our department chairs require these kinds of resources to meet professors’ needs and department priorities. Through Wake Will, we intend to invest more than $40 million to endow and support our academic departments through an initiative we’ll be rolling out in the coming months called The Source.

Read more

Archives