 HBCU Digest Radio, welcome back. This is our presidential series, Conversations with Distinguished Leaders from Historically Black Colleges and Universities throughout our great nation. Today, we are privileged to be joined by Dr. Alfred Anthony Pincard, the Distinguished President of Wilberforce University, who is here today to talk about the Wilberforce Unite campaign. This is an ambitious and aggressive $2 million campaign over the next several weeks that the university will use to gravitate and attract support to the most distinguished Wilberforce University. So Dr. Pincard, a pleasure to have you on today. Thank you very much for this invitation. So $2 million over the course of what? 60 plus days now, are we below the 60? 60 days, yes. It's a very aggressive campaign as you indicated. We have a 90 day challenge and we also have a goal that will take us through December 31st. But this first 90 day challenge, we did it for a couple of reasons. The goal is intentionally modest, given the fact that over the last couple of years, we've not done a campaign and we're looking at this as an annual campaign and not a capital campaign. But we wanted to give some discipline and some rigor to our fundraising here at the university. And so we've established the Wilberforce 2000, 2056 Future Focus Campaign and it is online as Wilberforce Unite. The byline of course is when we become, we a little bit becomes a lot. We're also like, we also are in the process of establishing a culture of philanthropy here, Jared. And also establishing a sustainable fundraising and institutional advancement infrastructure for sustainable fundraising. And again, as I indicated earlier, to bring a discipline and a rigor to our fundraising efforts here. This is also an opportunity for us to take the appetite of our constituent groups with regard to their fundraising capacity and interest. So there are a number of things that are sort of embedded in the reason why we've announced the campaign. Typically as you know, an annual campaign would not require this kind of attention. But because over the last, as I indicated several years, we've not done a campaign, an annual campaign here of sorts. We wanted to give this a lot of attention so that we can begin, as I said earlier, to establish this cultural philanthropy. This is not a one time deal. This is an opportunity for us to fundraise these efforts every year, annually, to sustain the university and the work that we're doing here. And you've had some early buy-in from the executives, certainly from the Board of Trustees. You have announced a couple of weeks ago a gift from the Board Chair. And I think of the accompanying gift from his corporation, the Denny's Corporation. And you've had some other contributions. Talk about those efforts to try to cultivate that new culture of philanthropy. And how does the campaign build largely off the lead of those executives? Well, you know, we are in a particularly interesting and favorable space in higher education, as you know, I'm sorry, in the HBCU space particularly. And so gaining the buy-in from our Board Chair and Board of Trustees and other executive partners was not a difficult accomplishment, but it was essential. And so Wilberforce Unique Position as the first HBCU of its kind, private founded by people of African descent, four people of African descent, we find that everybody has a collective sort of loyalty and allegiance to that reality. And so Wilberforce, we've found that we've just not asked in any sustainable way in the past. And now that we have begun to ask, we see that people are very interested in supporting Wilberforce to make sure that Wilberforce can sustain another 163 years of existence. And so this has been exciting in that regard. And this is, and we recognize that over the last several years, much of the news about Wilberforce has not been particularly flattering. It has been, we've had our challenges. I mean, I'd be disingenuous if I suggested that we have not. And that has been the prevailing narrative about Wilberforce in higher education, that this is an institution that's small and that's really struggling. And so when we mounted this campaign, we were doing it in a way that would help us to understand how are we viewed? What is the collective intention and interest among people to support Wilberforce? What do we need to do to tell a more compelling narrative about the work that we're doing presently at the university? And so that's what we're finding. We're finding that people are willing to help us and of course we've engaged professionals to help us get in front of high net worth individuals so that we can tell this story and tell the story in a way that will invite investment. So there's an impression in recent months, probably because of being in college, that the mold of HBCU fundraising and fundraising is being able to gross a lot in a little bit of time. Do you think that that's an opportunity for Wilberforce? Or does it present a challenge in some ways because Bennett was so unique and how much money it raised and how it did it and how national it went? Is that something you look to duplicate or is that something you look to say, we can scale that or do what we need to do to accomplish our objective? I think it's an opportunity. We view it as an opportunity. I think what it says to me and I think many of my colleagues will suggest, will say that it suggests that there is a well a wellspring of goodwill out there for HBCUs that despite what we may have been hearing or in fact experiencing over the last several years, that there are people who are willing to step up and to give resources to these institutions if in fact we craft a very compelling narrative around our accomplishments and around what the work that we plan to do and the work that we're engaging in. Every HBCU has a compelling institutional saga. Everyone does and it all and every HBCU has a very loyal constituent group and the challenge however is crafting an institutional narrative as I said earlier that invites investment. Bennett was able to do that and they were able to do that very successfully. In fact, from all accounts, they exceeded the goal that they originally set and we think that it will before we can do the same. But of course, and this has been something that has been noted among professional fundraisers for several years now, people are no longer interested in giving to an institution to keep it alive. People are interested in investing in what they feel is something that is moving forward in a sustainable way that where leadership and the individuals that are part of an institution have outlined a plan that they are rigorous in terms of adhering to that plan, that there are metrics that they use in order to determine their success and there's institutional scorecards and ways to look regularly and methodically at how an institution is doing such that if I invest in you, I feel good that my money is going to be put to good use. And I think that that's the message that we want to give about what's happening here at Wobble Force and as we go out, we're asking people to invest in the work that we're doing here and I think that that's an opportunity and I think that Bennett sort of paved the way and the work that they did, the successful work that they did indicated that it can be done if one institution can do it, others can do it as well. So we look at it as an opportunity. That putting the funding to good use is critical because I think a lot of folks kind of orbit the stereotype of what happens to the money when I give it and you guys have laid out a list of priorities for the funding to attend to faculty, enhancing faculty, enhancing facilities or providing student scholarships. But one of the things that's hard to see is financial stability for the institution for folks who are listening who don't know what that means and don't know what it connects to in terms of university administration and good standing. Can you talk a little bit about that area? Absolutely. We have outlined the work that we have done here. We have outlined what we call six institutional value drivers, Jared, that frame and guide of the work that we're doing here at Wobble Force and these value drivers, operational efficiency, academic excellence, fiscal responsibility, student engagement, image enhancement, civility and kindness. These are the value drivers that again, frame our work. Every day we are speaking to, the hazing to assessing our performance against these value drivers. And we recognize, particularly for HPC and particularly for small special mission institutions like at Wobble Force, that the first thing that people will ask about is how is the money being spent, but more specifically how, how, what are the internal controls? How accountable are the individuals there who are responsible for the funding? Much of this has to do with long histories of mistrust that are sort of endemic to our communities, quite frankly. I mean, that's another conversation in terms of how in many ways we are mistrustful of one another. But nevertheless, I think that it is important to say to people that we have outlined, again, these value drivers, we've been very specific in terms of where this money is going, that internal controls, accountability, responsibility around our finances is something that we take very, very seriously. In the fullness of time, people will have to come to believe that. I'm a new president here at Wobble Force. I've been here a little over a year. I understand that there is some skepticism, but I have to tell you, Jared, that if I were to be paralyzed by that skepticism, I wouldn't get any work done. And so what me and my team are committed to doing is to give the message of what we are doing here with around fiscal responsibility and accountability and to simply do the work, simply let the work speak for itself consistently, regularly, again, with rigor and discipline as we move forward with this campaign. Excellent. So tell us, how can we give, where can we give? And if there are goals or financial benchmarks you've met, you know, to encourage folks to match that, double that up, we've gotten a huge folks listening. Please tell us all the ways we can make those contributions. You are a wonderful host and I appreciate your, that wonderful segue into, you can go to the website, www.wobbleforceuniversity.edu or www.wobbleforceunite.com. It pulls up the website and you can, and there's a link and it says donate here and you can click that link and you can actually donate. You can also see where we are in terms of what we've raised thus far. Now, we were candid with you as we're listening to our consultant, our fundraising consultant. We, this is, I had some good news today and some challenging news. The good news was that we have raised more money in this short period of time than we have in our immediate past. So in terms of trending, that's a good thing as you know, if you look at trend data. So that means in this small period that we've launched this campaign, the money that we've raised has been, this has been the most money that we've raised. However, if we look at the benchmarks where we would like to be ideally at this point given the $2 million goal that we have by the end of June, we still have some work to do. But we wanna be transparent and so if you go to that link, you will see the amount of money that's been raised to date. And so that's encouraging for people, particularly our students and our faculty and our alums. We have a segmented on all of those groups. They all have goals. We're working with students that are very excited about this, faculty as well, alums. And so we've gotten the family, the Wilberford family, the community really sort of galvanized around this effort and so people are very excited about it. We still have a ways to go, but and we are very, very hopeful, very strongly hopeful that we will reach our goal of $2 million by the end of June.