LeaderNotes Summer 2022

Since I last wrote, the USM and the USM Foundation have been hard at work advancing education throughout the state. We focused on much of this work at our full Foundation Board meeting on June 8, which you can read more about later in this newsletter.

This meeting was Bonnie Stein’s final as Foundation Board chair. I simply can’t thank Bonnie enough for her commitment to the Foundation. Under Bonnie’s leadership, the Foundation’s total assets under management have grown from $1.1 billion to $2.2 billion. As chair of the Governance Committee and then as Board chair, she helped diversify the Board and has stressed the importance of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ), establishing a DEIJ working group with broad representation from the Board. In addition, Bonnie has strengthened the Foundation’s focus on service to our USM campuses. Bonnie helped to allocate $300,000 to our campuses and regional centers for emergency-use funds for students in the spring of 2020. We are so grateful for her leadership and for her guidance these past years. I now look forward to working with our next Board chair, Don Scheeler, who has served as a director on the Board since 2015.

Across the USM, our campuses are having a great fundraising year, surpassing a System-wide goal of $322 million at the end of March. Gifts and pledges across the System stand at roughly $390 million in June. Nearly all of our campuses are at or over goal. The University of Maryland, Baltimore County received the largest gift in the school’s history – a $21 million donation from the Sherman Family Foundation – in February. The gift will expand the impact of UMBC’s K-12 and early childhood education efforts and will provide funding for the Betsy & George Sherman Center to advance excellence in urban schools. You can read more about the wonderful gifts our campuses have received later on in this newsletter.

Lastly, I am excited to welcome two new presidents to the System. Valerie Sheares Ashby joins UMBC on August 1 and comes to Maryland from Duke University where she has served as dean of the Trinity College of Arts & Sciences. She will succeed Freeman Hrabowski, who has served as president of UMBC for the past 30 years. We also welcome Carolyn Ringer Lepre to Salisbury University. She comes to SU on July 15 from Radford University and succeeds Chuck Wight who has served as president since 2018. You can read more about our two new presidents later on in this newsletter.

As always, please reach out to me with any questions you may have!