Unrestricted Support for the UI

Total campaign goal: $30 million

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Important opportunities that are crucial to achieving the UI's strategic goals often arise unexpectedly and outside the budgetary forecasts of the UI's colleges, departments, and programs.

These promising possibilities deserve to be given the chance to become fully explored and realized. This is why the University relies so heavily on the unrestricted Iowa Impact Fund.

Almost all of the philanthropic resources given by contributors to the UI are precisely earmarked -- or restricted to specifically defined uses -- and cannot be applied to initiatives other than those designated by the contributors.

In fact, less than 1 percent of gifts to the University each year are unrestricted, or available for spending to meet needs and opportunities as they arise.

The importance of unrestricted resources to the UI cannot be overstated. In short, they allow students, faculty, and staff throughout the University to respond quickly to -- and create -- opportunities that arise outside of daily budgets or targeted campaign initiatives.

Because of the very nature of unrestricted resources, it is hard to predict how those resources will be used. However, in consultation with faculty and administrators throughout the UI community, unrestricted funds are likely to be utilized by the University president in some of the following ways:

• To facilitate study-abroad programs for bright and eager undergraduate students from all areas of campus
• To initiate graduate and professional programs that focus on emerging trends and disciplines
• To create endowed professorships for faculty who are pursuing the sorts of groundbreaking research or artistic endeavors that make the UI stand out among its peers
• To encourage innovations in teaching and learning across disciplinary boundaries
• To assist the UI's libraries and museums in seeking out and acquiring the best and the latest for their collections

The availability of such discretionary funding -- so critical at a time when world events and research breakthroughs happen at lightning speed -- is a hallmark of a great university.

It is those contributors who take a big-picture view of the UI, who see that the University's wide-ranging endeavors are all facets of the same gem, who will help keep Iowa ahead of the curve -- by giving to the Iowa Impact Fund.