Sydney hits $1bn fundraising goal

Australia’s top higher education fundraiser, the University of Sydney, has hit its ambitious target of raising $1 billion in a 10-year-long philanthropic campaign.

University of Sydney vice-chancellor Michael Spence.

Australia’s top higher education fundraiser, the University of Sydney, has hit its ambitious target of raising $1 billion in a 10-year-long philanthropic campaign.

Vice-chancellor Michael Spence made the announcement, touting it as the “largest philanthropic achievement by any university in Australian history”.

Also, to Sydney’s evident pleasure, it has trounced its arch rival the University of Melbourne, which also set the goal of raising $1bn but has targeted 2021 to achieve the feat.

Dr Spence said the university’s achievement was “transformative” and “allows us to undertake research and build initiatives that are changing lives and making a difference in our communities and the wider world”.

He also thanked the university’s 64,000 donors for their “incredible generosity”.

“Your support makes it possible for the university to continue to have a positive impact on ­society and inspire future generations,” Dr Spence said. The campaign, which the university called Inspired!, was launched quietly in 2008, around the time of Dr Spence’s appointment, but not ­announced publicly until 2013, giving the fundraisers time and space to make progress away from public scrutiny.

The university said that there was originally scepticism that an Australian organisation could achieve such a high fundraising target.

Initially the goal was to raise $600 million, but that figure was reached in 2015, so the target was stretched — first to $750m and then $1bn.

The University of Sydney reached the goal guided by a specialist fundraiser from the US, Tim Dolan, who arrived in January 2009 to take up his role as the university’s vice-principal ­(advancement). He came from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he had just completed a successful $US3bn campaign.

Mr Dolan, who leaves Australia today for a new job at the University of Hawaii, said Dr Spence had seen the enormous promise of university-wide fundraising campaigns across the globe.

He noted that universities in Australia other than the University of Sydney had also boosted their fundraising over the past decade by proving to well-off people that they could achieve big, important outcomes.

“If you can prove to them that you can accomplish these things then people will invest in them,” Mr Dolan said.

About 90 per cent of the University of Sydney’s philanthropic income came from large donations, he said.

Among the biggest donations of the 10-year campaign were $35m from the Susan & Isaac Wakil Foundation to help build a health precinct; $34m from Barry and Joy Lambert to fund research into the medical use of cannabinoids (inspired by the successful treatment of their granddaughter’s epilepsy); the anonymous gift of a Picasso painting, Jeune fille endormie, which raised $21m; $20m from businessman John Grill for a centre for leadership; $15m from Chinese businessman Chau Chak Wing for a new museum currently being built near the university’s historic gatehouse; and a $15m bequest from Ellie a Beckett, a little-known woman in the country NSW town of Wellington, for bowel cancer research.