The plan to raise $200 million in support of students, scholarships and other Weber State University initiatives began on Jan. 9 through the public phase of Amplify Weber State: The Campaign for Weber State University. The campaign started back in 2020, as a silent phase to start building a steering committee with Steve Starks as the chair.
“We start to build out: What are our priorities? What are the overarching priorities for the university? Then each college or unit also has priorities,” said Kelly Stackaruk campaign director for the fundraising team. “We determine those, and then we figure out how much each initiative we would like to raise and that’s how we create our goal of $200 million based on what our dreams are, what we’re hoping to support.”
CATapult is one of the scholarships that is being funded by Amplify. Helping students who are very close to graduating and just need a little bit more support and nontraditional students who left and are coming back, coming to college for the first time or those who have attended.
“If somebody graduates from automotive technology, they want to come back and support students who are majoring in automotive. They can have that as a criteria for their scholarship. If they don’t care, it will go into a general scholarship fund,” Stackaruk said.
Apart from scholarships, Amplify has funded different centers for students. Such as a learning, living lab with a field station at Island Park in Yellowstone.
“It’ll be a location where we can take students out, whether they’re science majors or not, and basically just go enjoy nature,” zoology major James Bustin said. “We’re just right next to Yellowstone, so there’s all kinds of different animals and things like that. We are hoping to get art students out there because nature is the best place to make art.”
Andrea Easter-Pilcher, dean of the College of Science, spearheaded the idea when the opportunity came up. With the motivation being there have been many field stations down south and not as many up north.
“Other schools can come up and help use the facilities, and they’ll bring in people who are doing research that will work side by side with our students,” Stackaruk said.
The field station for the College of Science is one of the many overarching initiatives that has been started within Amplify. Each college has their own priorities depending on their own needs, with the College of Engineering creating an endowed faculty position, yet to be named, then provide support in perpetuity. With the help of Children’s Adaptive Physical Education Society!, the College of Social Sciences will pair students with children with disabilities to create a unique learning environment.
The different donors as well as the Ampifly team have made a lot of impacts on Weber, with their funding, projects and scholarships. These help create bigger opportunities for many students and furthering education for many students. “They make a big impact on Weber State, so I’m very thankful for them,” senior Maria Flores said.
The campaign has raised over $125.5 million dollars, reaching 63% of their goal and projecting to complete it through 2028 with plans for a closing campaign.
