Initiative benchmarks postponed

Author: Lea Calderon-Guthe

As the College's endowment continues to drop in the economic downturn, the Middlebury Initiative's goal of raising $500 million in the next five years may be unfeasible. However, Vice President for College Advancement Mike Schoenfeld said the state of the endowment will not compromise the goal of the Initiative, only its timeline.

"The Middlebury Initiative is our way to describe the goals that we have, some of which require financial support, some of which do not," Schoenfeld said. "We accomplish a lot of the goals of the Initiative from all of our revenue sources, but because the endowment has dropped and because gifts have slowed down, the pace of those things we want to do as part of the Middlebury Initiative has slowed down."

The Middlebury Initiative is essentially a fundraising campaign to support the College's goals, especially those outlined in the 2006 Strategic Plan. Two different aspects of the Initiative draw two different kinds of gifts: the Annual Fund takes in small gifts up to $100,000 from tens of thousands of alumni and parents every year, while larger gifts of $100,000 or more, generally multiple-year pledges, go towards the endowment and support large projects like buildings, professorships and scholarships. Schoenfeld gave an Annual Fund goal of $14 to $15 million a year and said the College is actually ahead of its Annual Fund goal for this year.

"If you look historically at giving trends, there's a significant correlation between personal income level and support for the annual fund," Schoenfeld said. "While the economy has gone down, personal income has remained relatively strong."

Where the Middlebury Initiative has suffered is in the area of large donations. Small contributions continue to trickle in, but large pledges are nowhere in sight. President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz and Schoenfeld both attributed the drop in large gifts to the volatility of the New York Stock Exchange.

"The economy has made it very difficult