Celebrating 50 Years of Impact and Inspiration
Our history
Since the earliest days of the UC Santa Cruz Foundation established in 1974, trustees have played a pivotal role in bringing the UC Santa Cruz vision to life. Through their generosity, stewardship, leadership, and advocacy, and in opening doors to new relationships, the Foundation Board’s impact has resounded throughout the campus and beyond. The trustees’ support, energies, expertise, and dedication have helped UC Santa Cruz grow from an experiment on a hill to a leading U.S. public research university with global reach.
Over the fifty-year partnership between the UC Santa Cruz Foundation Board and campus leaders, there likely is not one person, department, school, creative or research endeavor, program, facility, or public space that hasn’t benefited from a trustee or other donor stepping up and saying, “I can make this happen.”
Our trustees
The Foundation Board of Trustees was instrumental in the success of the Campaign for UC Santa Cruz–the university’s first campus-wide campaign–which raised more than $335 million and ended ahead of schedule in 2017. Trustees helped forge relationships with new donors whose interests dovetailed with campaign goals, and served as key partners in a campaign with signature achievements that included rebuilding the historic Hay Barn; renovating the Quarry Amphitheater; the naming and endowment of Rachel Carson College; the launch of the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute, Institute of the Arts and Sciences, and the graduate program in Coastal Science and Policy. Since the inception of the foundation, trustees and other donors have endowed 24 new professorships: positions that have helped fuel the emergence of UC Santa Cruz as a top research institution.
Board Opportunity Fund
The Board Opportunity Fund (BOF) is another means through which Foundation trustees are making an immediate impact at UC Santa Cruz. BOF grants provide seed funds for campus projects–and can also help these initiatives gain traction and attract additional funding. The BOF’s first grant, in 2009, helped launch the Genome 10K Project, a research effort of the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute. More recent grants include Giving Day challenge funds–including a grant to help spur donations for much-needed student support during the COVID-19 pandemic; and support for Barring Freedom, a program of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences that invites viewers to think in new ways about social justice and the prison industrial complex. The program has, since its inception, received considerable national attention and grants from external foundations in support of its work, thanks in part to the momentum created by the early support from Foundation Board members.