Dr. Ralph Ford, chancellor of Penn State Behrend, talks with Kevin Moore, director of development and alumni relations, about Penn State’s six-year capital campaign, “A Greater Penn State for 21st Century Excellence.” Originally recorded June 22, 2022.
Dr. Ralph Ford, chancellor of Penn State Behrend, talks with Kevin Moore, director of development and alumni relations, about Penn State’s six-year capital campaign, “A Greater Penn State for 21st Century Excellence.” Originally recorded June 22, 2022.
Welcome to Behrend Talks. I'm Dr. Ralph Ford, Chancellor of Penn State Behrend, and my guests today is Kevin Moore. Kevin is our Director of Development and Alumni Relations. Kevin, welcome to the show.
Kevin Moore:Thank you very much, Dr. Ford.
Ralph Ford:Well, thank you for joining us today. And this is your second time on the show. But we've got a lot to talk about as we're finishing our campaign. But let me just give you a little bit of background for our listeners. Kevin, you are actually a two time Penn State graduate. You graduated from Behrend and Harrisburg. So, you got a bachelor's here?
Kevin Moore:I did. I earned my bachelor's in Communications here from Penn State Behrend. Then I worked for Marriott in D.C. for three years, returned to Penn State Harrisburg for my graduate degree in public administration and health care.
Ralph Ford:All right. So you are a true-blue Penn State alumnus. And that's great, because you lead not only Development, but our Alumni Relations office. And, you know, we're coming to the completion of a very significant campaign where the University has raised(and it's always easy to put that number out there), but we've raised over $2 billion. in fact, about 2.1. And Behrend has had a significant success as well with $75 million. We'll dig deeper into that, including June 30. But anyways, congratulations on that success.
Kevin Moore:Thank you. Thank you. It's a team approach. I mean, as we always say, it takes a village to raise that kind of money. And there's great support across the campus from academic leadership, from your office, and of course, right through my teammates in development.
Ralph Ford:I'd say it's all part of the culture, and it really is an important culture. But before we get into fundraising, you know, what you do is development director. Tell us, you know, how did you end up at Behrend? We started a little bit. You were a student here. you didn't you grow up in Pennsylvania, I don't think. So you ended up at Behrend, Harrisburg. Tell us how you got here.
Kevin Moore:Well, I was born in Alexandria, Virginia, and my folks split up and we ended up moving to northeastern Pennsylvania, almost the exact opposite corner of the state. And in high school, even there, everybody went to Penn State. So I applied, but I didn't get into University Park, as they say. Which worked out for the better all the way around. I wanted to go as far away from home as possible, quite frankly. So I didn't even select Behrend at that time. Because when I looked at the rectangular map of Pennsylvania, the diametrically opposed corners that's as far away as I wanted to go in Pennsylvania and have in state tuition. So that really was the driver for me to Penn State and then being in state but being as far away from home as possible. And so I ended up at Behrend and enjoyed my experience here tremendously. You know, came in as a student in 1981. John Lilley had been here for one year as the as the fairly new Provost and Dean. I believe that was his title at the time. But that was our chancellor at the time, and I got to meet all kinds of folks as a student here. That really developed my sense of passion and love for Behrend people like Ted Junker and Bob Metzgar, who were really the the luminaries at the time that were leading the fundraising and leading the campus initiatives and stuff.
Ralph Ford:I mean, that at that time in Behrend was obviously, much smaller, much different. But a lot of things were changing at that point, like you talked about, there were a lot of community leaders coalescing around the world, a lot of energy to say, What can this place be? But let's talk about the academic side. First, you got a degree in communication.
Kevin Moore:That's right. And communications at the time, I wanted to be a journalist. In fact, Peter Jennings came to town, who was the ABC anchor, and I got to interview him as part of the Beacon. I was writing for the -- there was a Behrend Collegian at the time for the school paper. So I got to go and interview him. And then I started really getting excited about it. But he started telling me about what a slog it was to get where he is. And you know, as a 22-year-old, you're kind of thinking, "Boy, I'm not sure I want to go for $16,000 a year job and working 24/7 in media." So that quickly changed. I ended up working at an internship at American Sterilizer Corporation here in town, because I wanted to get into corporate communications at the time. So I did that. And that's an interesting twist in my path, because at the time, internships were required for the communications program. And so I looked at the board for all the different opportunities, and there was this fledgling congressman that was looking for an intern as well at the time. And I thought, "No, I'm gonna go the corporate route." Well, that fledgling congressman was Tom Ridge. Had I gone with Tom Ridge, when he first got started in the '80s, my career path would have been much different,
Ralph Ford:Those little choices make a difference. I hope that they would both have been good career paths. So in the communication program, were there any particular faculty who stand out or who really influenced you? Well, you know, it's, it's always we look back
Kevin Moore:Yeah, most of whom have retired since then. Bob Francesconi was the the communications faculty member that focused on on the public media side, and was who really taught me to write. Mike Chiteman was another one in English who taught me to write, and is still a good friend to and the faculty truly make a difference in our lives. And this day. But it was a wonderful mixture of faculty that had writing experience. There were a number of faculty, Bob DiNicola, I remember to was at the Erie Times at the time. So there were journalists, there were communication people, there were marketing people involved in that. And all had -- to this day, it's still a trademark of Behrend -- is that it's industry experience and our faculty that really make the difference in quality faculty at Penn State Behrend. you, like you said, you've built lifelong connections. Now, you mentioned one thing that I just wanted to go back to. And that was meeting Peter Jennings. And I guess you've told me that before, but I didn't really realize the significance. And he was a real gentleman. And quite, just quite the, you know, the, the impact that he had. And I think maybe underrated in the world of broadcast news. What was that, like? It was it was intimidating, of course, for a 22-year-old to be talking to someone you see on TV every
night at 6:30. But he was a gentleman. He was very kind. It was actually a couple of us from the schools. It wasn't a solo kind of interview. There were a couple of other students from Gannon and Mercyhurst, or other schools in town. But he was very generous in his direction and his mentorship, you know, encouraging us to go into it. He said it was a very worthwhile path that he had to get there. He was a Canadian, spent a lot of time like most people do in the trenches, literally of wars and places like that in Vietnam and worked his way up. But very nice guy.
Ralph Ford:Yeah, you could not tell his politics. And I think just from, you know, a different age of media and journalism. Okay, but let's switch to how you you got your degree here. And then you ended up working at Marriott. So how did you get back here to Behrend?
Kevin Moore:Well, I was still staying in touch with a few folks. Mike Chiteman was one of them, one of my faculty members, and Marybeth McCarthy, who was heading up the Career Center here at the time, I had worked with extensively, she was in Financial Aid and Career Services while I was a student. And she called and said, they had an opening for an internship coordinator at the time. And I thought, "Well, that'll be fun." Let me go back to Erie and work there at my alma mater for a few years and see how that goes. And that few years turned into 10 years in career development, which then turned into the Alumni Relations job at the college. And that was another four years, and then I got hooked on development. And I've been in that really ever since. So it's been 20-plus years now in development here.
Ralph Ford:Let's talk about the development role. So for our listeners, you lead our development operation here. You've got a team, a very effective team here at Behrend. But I think there are a lot of myths, and you and I joke about it, about fundraising and development. So let's dig into that. I mean, let's let's talk about, you know, what are some of the myths, but more seriously, why do people give? What motivates people to be part of an organization, whether it's higher ed or medicine, or, you know. People give very generously in this country,
Kevin Moore:They do. They give very generously, specifically in Erie. They give very generously, we have a large community foundation here that represents that kind of wealth in the community. But I would say that all the nonprofits would say the same thing in town. Whether it's universities or the smaller nonprofits, that donors, by and large in the Erie Community are very philanthropic oriented. They want to have an impact. So that's usually what it comes down to is most donors want to have an impact, and want to leave a legacy, want to have a change in the community for the better the way they see it going. It's not often driven by politics, it's often driven by more by caring for your fellow human. And what I find though, as most people don't know how to do those things. You know, as a philanthropic adviser, people don't, they say I want to create a scholarship, but they have no idea how to do that. They don't know minimum levels. They don't know financial transactions to fund those things. They don't know how to effectively create one and evaluate one and make sure that it's doing what they wanted to do or achieve. So we find ourselves really in the philanthropic advisory role for our donors. And sometimes they don't materialize as gifts to Behrend. We advise people on how to give, and you know, some of our better donors, of course, end up choosing to give to us, because their purpose is alive. You know, the, that's the magic. A donor has an idea, they have wealth, they want to do something, and if we can be advising them to that path, that's really where the magic happens.
Ralph Ford:I think it's really this continuum. People tend to get involved in the institution, some come in and say, you know, I'd like to give a gift. And that certainly happens. But usually it's based on years of affinity, they've served on a board or they're connected some way. And people believe in the institution. Or they've got some connection.
Kevin Moore:Yeah, there's, there's a circle, really in development and in fundraising, that starts with identifying someone or them identifying themselves to us. And then it's an engagement process. A cultivation process is what we call it, but we get them engaged in various levels of activity, whatever feels good to them, whatever fits with them professionally or personally. They can be on advisory boards, they can be engaged in planning committees and things at the college or outdoors, wherever their expertise can come into play. And then engagement over time does get them passionate about the organization and a better understanding. Because as you mentioned earlier, the longevity of the relationships is these kinds of things, are really based on trust. Once you know somebody, once they know you and they have a trust not only in the organization or the cause. They have to have a trust and that gift officer to know that they have their best interests in mind, that they're telling them the truth, that they're giving them the full story. Transparency is paramount in our world. So what we find is people get engaged with Behrend, and as we all know, around this table, Behrend is a pretty special place and has a direct impact in our community. So we find that a lot of people want to be part of a winning team.
Ralph Ford:Well, I think that's very well said, when you look at the conclusion of our campaign that ends at the end of this month, technically, but we're pretty much there. It's called the Greater Penn State campaign. And our goal in that campaign was to raise $60 million. And let's say said, we put the number out there, but it was really to focus on different areas of support from scholarship and the like. So tell us a bit about our campaign. How do campaigns work? What were we trying to achieve?
Kevin Moore:Well, it's a little bit different at Penn State, because we're part of the bigger machine. The $2.1 billion that you mentioned earlier, we are a component of that. There are 44 fundraising units within Penn State that represent the Smeal College of Business, or the College of Engineering, all the way up through Hershey Medical, Penn State Football. They're all these different units. And our unit is definitely one of the bigger ones outside of State College. In fact, we're bigger than several of the units at State College. So we're a big player, out of those 44, we typically ranked 10th in terms of fundraising impact for the university. So Penn State, through the president and the trustees and the leadership at University Park, define a campaign until here are the broad campaign goals for us. And then what we do is we localize them, because we are Penn State in northwestern Pennsylvania and this regional area. So we go under that umbrella of the campaign. But we tend to tailor those to the needs of the community. What fits for Behrend, parlaying our expertise in various areas to have that community impact.
Ralph Ford:But one way we incentivize the campaign is we create matching funds. And for those who would like to create endowments, and they match the priorities to talk about matching funds. And where were the matching fund opportunities in this campaign?
Kevin Moore:The biggest matching fund opportunities for us were in two areas. One was economic development, there were Well, there are a whole lot of things. We're going to dig into significant funds available. The university set aside $53 million actually, to match donor gifts one-to-one for economic development impact projects. And we had a number of those here, the Innovation Commons project that we'll probably talk about a little bit in more detail. For Knowledge Park we had a $3 million gift from Pat Black and Sumi James-Black to underwrite that park going forward, which will help with recruitment and retention in the park, improvement in the park to make it a destination park for the businesses that are up there. They're partnering with the University. We also have the Magee Womens Research initiative here in town, which is a partnership with UPMC Hamot, Magee Women's Hospital in Pittsburgh, Erie Community Foundation and the Hamot Health Foundation to have a direct positive impact on women's health care and health care research in the community here. them. Because really there there is a lot there. But what's really important to understand is for these endowments, we do match one-to-one in perpetuity. So for those who are looking at Sure, the university takes its donor funds and pools them in investing, putting in a gift fund, they're really, they get a about a $4.3 billion fund right now. So essentially, donors are buying a share into that larger pool. So that size pool affords significant return that you wouldn't otherwise see. That's us great expertise and opportunities for investment that are afforded to the average Joe. Our returns average 10 years prior to COVID. We're averaging 10% over the last 10 years. So that's a better return than almost any organization can get. We don't touch principle in almost every case. For those part of it. endowments when the donor puts$100,000 in and the university matches that 100,000, that combined $200,000 is really never touched. And we operate on a 5% spending model. Now$200,000 is going to generate$10,000 a year in perpetuity for the purpose that the donor assigns. The money stays at Behrend 100%, is never spent in a different way from what the donor has outlined for us. We have a contract with them. So they can be assured that all the money will stay on the purpose that they assigned.
Ralph Ford:Now those are really good points, and when we look at some of the gifts. And unfortunately, we can't cover them all in this discussion today. But let's start with
Kevin Moore:Well, it's it's our maker space on campus. It's part Innovation Commons. And we created something called the James R. Meehl Innovation Commons. And that was a matching fund gift. Tell us what's this Innovation Commons about? What happens there? of the economic development initiative in the region. The Beehive Initiative that we have here is a partnership with Gannon, Edinboro, Mercyhurst and ourselves, to help bring entrepreneurs to market to help give them opportunities to develop business plans to develop prototypes. In our particular case, at Edinboro, they do the marketing for them. And it helps us to foster the economic development through entrepreneurship in our community.
Ralph Ford:And the stories are phenomenal. I mean, you go up there on any given day, and what do you see students there working, young men and women who, frankly they come to campus as young students, and they say I want to work in that place. So we have, frankly, we have no shortage of people who want to work there. But the endowment, it supports the students that keeps this thing going in perpetuity.
Kevin Moore:Yeah, well, we Behrend started the Innovation Commons two years prior to this launch box in the university-wide initiative. And when the university launched the launch box initiative, there was a million dollars assigned to each one of those campus launch boxes, 24 of them throughout the system. We were amongst the first to get ours endowed, fully endowed, so we had a million dollar pool to work against. And the James R. Meehl Innovation Commons is actually a combination of a number of donors that put money towards that, the Meehl family generously provided the larger gift of that which afforded them the naming opportunity for that. But Zurn was one of the big donors, and they were and there were a number of other private supporters that supported that that cause to get it's a $2 million endowment. So that $2 million now is going to generate$100,000 a year in perpetuity, to provide students salaries, to provide materials equipment for that lab, to support the entrepreneurial community.
Ralph Ford:You know, you started the conversations with scholarships. And scholarships are really important to donors, they're important to our students, people can see that impact immediately. They get to see that students benefit from them. But how do we do in terms of scholarships in this campaign? What type of scholarships did we create?
Kevin Moore:Thanks for asking and coming back to that, because I did mention that there were two areas of match funds. And the second is the scholarships. Early on, we had two-to-one matches and one-to-one matches for scholarships. Typically the focus this time under the Penn State campaign, the Greater Penn State campaign, the emphasis was to provide access and affordability especially to those families that traditionally have not been able to afford a college education. That means typically diverse communities, communities of low socio-economic opportunity. And so we raised quite a bit of money, actually, with 54 new scholarships at Behrend. They now generate $1.4 million and new scholarship per year for our students. It's also opened up a lot of conversations and audiences for us in the Erie School District. For example, where a lot of that lower socio-economic student population would come from. So it's afforded us a lot of opportunities to reach new audiences of students here, to increase the diversity of our student population. And we had a lot of folks that jumped on the bandwagon with that, because the match, but also because of the purpose of helping those less fortunate,
Ralph Ford:Well, a big donor or supporter was Erie Insurance. And they created this program called Accelerate, the Erie Insurance Accelerate program. And it was one of our early gifts in the campaign. very impactful. What is that program about?
Kevin Moore:Erie Insurance had a couple of different goals with that. Besides the match funds, what was really driving them were two factors, one to be good corporate citizens in our community and help those less fortunate, but also to help them recruit and retain employees long term, people from Erie like to stay in the area, and they're looking for job opportunity. So as we sat down with Erie Insurance and formulated this plan, between the match fund and their corporate philosophy, and their goal to hire and retain individuals in this community, it all came together for us. And they were able able to leverage that match funding in there. If I remember the numbers, right, they put in about one and a half million dollars in the university match that two and a half million to a $4 million fund that has significant impact in the community. And the way those scholarships are structured, we call it our PaSSS Program and that stands for Pathway to Success: Summer Start. And so what that does is for rising high school seniors, they are able to start at the university in the summer, right after school. They are given study skills, they're given classes, so they can get acclimated to the university environment. They're also given a job on campus, in addition to the scholarship, so it really kind of provides that strong footing for them to be successful academically at Penn State.
Ralph Ford:And then there's another part now to add to that in there. Once those students get into their second year, we provide funding for them to work with startups and nonprofits in the community. So not only that, we want them to graduate from their on campus job, so that they then start working in a you know, a quote, real world job. And boy, this makes a real difference in their lives, doesn't it?
Kevin Moore:It really does. It makes a difference in their lives. And also the the impact on the nonprofits in the community. They don't always have funding to support those students and summer jobs, to get experience in marketing and web design and the various academic programs that we have. But these jobs provide a resource to the local community as well in the nonprofit world.
Ralph Ford:Well, another impactful project, and I guess we've got a lot of names for them. It's called the Mirror Project. But this idea of the Mirror Project is one that's frankly the brainchild of our retiring Director of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Dr. Eric Corty. So what is what is this Mirror Project?
Kevin Moore:Eric is a wonderful guy. He's a softy, but he has a deep passion for equity. And he has a story a few years ago about the Erie school district and how the population of the Erie school district is largely minority. And the teacher population in those schools is exactly the opposite. So students were not seeing teachers that looked like them. And Eric wanted to create a program that incentivized African American students to get a degree in education. Then come back to the school and represent that population for children, so they can see a pathway to their success in the future, and see that there's a role model in front of them. So Eric calls it the Mirror Project, because it mirrors for that student, successful opportunity going down the road. So Eric has generously offered a 50-cents-on-the-dollar match for anyone who wants to make gifts to this. $100,000 was given by Larson Texts, and Eric put in$50,000 already, so we're often running to raise hopefully$500,000 which will generate a full scholarship for a student from the Erie school district that wants to major in elementary education here at Penn State Behrend.
Ralph Ford:Eric is very passionate about this and obviously put his money where his mouth is, and will leave a great legacy here. Let's switch to professorships. That's another way. And let's pick two that we can talk about, first of all, Ed and Elaine Auslander created a professorship and so did Clarion Technologies. What are those? How do they help the institution
Kevin Moore:That was another match opportunity that Penn State provided. Early career professorships are a permanent endowment fund that affords opportunities to newly minted PhD professors, tenure track faculty that are coming into the university. It gives them extra resources to conduct their research, to provide conferencing opportunities, to provide dollars to hire students in their research. So it gives them a leg up. Three years is our model here at Penn State Behrend. A faculty member is selected by the academic leadership to be that early career professor that named one. In this case Ed and Elaine Auslander, early career professorship. They are in that role for three years and there's funding that comes with those models. The match funding was arranged that the donor provides$400,000. The university put in$100,000 for a combined half million dollars. And every year that generates about $25,000 in revenue for that faculty member to apply to their research and their career advancement.
Ralph Ford:And that helps us to find the best and brightest, and bring them here to Erie, PA. Which isn't always easy. So it helps us be competitive.
Kevin Moore:Absolutely. Career professorships, any named endowment, or any named position, really is a great recruitment and retention tool for any university. We're working on building those. That is a priority for us to be able to retain the faculty that come here that we want to retain, that are really high end faculty to advance our programs. You know, there's a great story to behind the one that was created by Ed Auslander and his wife Elaine. They named it after one of our faculty members now deceased, Dr. Chet Wolford, I Yeah. Ed had actually an undergraduate mechanical engineering degree from University Park and was the head of the Lord Corporation here in Erie. And came back and worked on his MBA here at the college and earned his MBA from Penn State Behrend and during that time. He regularly credited Chet Wolford as one of the most influential faculty members in his career, who really taught him to write write succinctly, write accurately, and write effectively. And he regularly attributed his rise at the Lord Corporation to the CEO level and strong part to what Chet Wolford had imparted upon him up through the years. So Ed always wanted to do this something support just love that story as to what why did he do that? Chet's memory and acknowledges his role here and that career professorship sure did it.
Ralph Ford:It sure did. And you know, he's he said, writing is thinking and thinking is writing. And Chet Wolford really pushed him hard and changed his perspective. And that's what should happen in higher education. You know, a few others I'd like to talk about. One is, of course, our long term benefactors here, the Black family. Pat Black and his daughter Sumi are really passionate about economic development and how we grow this region. And they made a significant gift as well to support Knowledge Park.
Kevin Moore:Yeah, the Black family is truly even much more than a benefactor. They are a partner in the University. The Black family, of course, endowed the Sam and Irene Black School of Business here at Penn State Behrend. But over those years, their son Pat has been extremely generous with us, and influential with us, chairing the Business Advisory Board, being on the Council of Fellows, being actively involved. And more recently, his daughter Sumi James-Black has been equally involved in various projects. And a couple of years ago, we started talking about impact in our community. And those who know Pat, know that one of his primary passions is Erie. And in particular manufacturing in the Erie community, and that no community can succeed if it is all service based. And we currently have about a 20% manufacturing base in our economy here. And Pat said very clearly that he wanted to support the community in some way to prevent further erosion of that manufacturing base, to attract new manufacturing, but to at least keep it at that 20% Because that's a healthy community. So through those discussions, Pat started realizing that investing in Knowledge Park, the partnership up there that we have with business and industry was an excellent way to help retain, recruit and perpetuate the manufacturing community and the business community in the Erie region.
Ralph Ford:Well, you know, one of the hallmarks and strengths of Behrend is that is our community engagement across the board, whether it's on social or economic issues. And as you said, the Black family has had a tremendous impact. But we also started something completely new in this campaign. People don't always know us for and that is one that's focused on women's health and biomedical research. And we started some new majors but it's a very ambitious undertaking that we've started, called this partnership with the Magee Women's Research Institute. What's that one about?
Kevin Moore:The Magee Women's Research Institute is a partnership with UPMC Hamot, Magee Women's in Pittsburgh. And it's a research project to look at genomic testing, and studies of the population in this region to help better understand women's health concerns. Typically, obstetrics gynecological oncological, in particular, we have higher cancer rates in this region. And so what they found was Magee is well known tops in the world in terms of women's health care research. But they noticed that the Erie population tends to be not as transient as many populations. So they could find a great-grandmother, a grandmother, a mother, a daughter, in the community, and they can do longitudinal genetic testing and studies. So that's the the genesis of the project at Penn State Behrend, we are working on the Women's Health Initiative, which is going to broaden that to broader issues that concern health issues that concern women in our region.
Ralph Ford:You know, having been involved with this, from the beginning, both you and I it was really gratifying when Magee Women's Research Institute reached out to us and said we'd like to establish this in Erie and we see you as a key partner. And not only has it allowed us to hire great faculty and bringing new faculty, we've created new academic programs like molecular biology and biomedical engineering minors that are attracting students, we've got a great new laboratory at Knowledge Park. You know, in the long term, this is going to make a tremendous difference in our community. And it is all of us working together to make the community better on this one. I want to finish with one one last gift to talk about. And that is, you know, in recent weeks, we opened a new addition here on campus, we opened in addition to the Federal House, which is the new home of the Susan Hirt Hagen CORE, which is the Center for Outreach and Research Evaluation. And that would not have happened without a significant gift. Tell us about
Kevin Moore:That was a really interesting project. A number of that. folks have been instrumental in getting that to where it is today, including the Smith family, and the owners of the house that had gifted the property a few years back. But Tom Hagen had always had a passion, as all of us in the community know for historical renovations and preservation, and came to the offices one day and said that he would like to see that property saved. And probably about 30 years ago, 25 years ago now, under Chancellor Lilley at the time, Tom had said we want to button that up and preserve it. It's deteriorating, and how do we do that? So it was buttoned up Jeff Kidder, an architect here in town designed to plan to put windows in it and a roof on it to keep it from being exposed to the elements. And that's the way it was for about 20 years. So we were able to take one of the oldest brick structures in Erie County, certainly in Harborcreek Township, and converted into a very state of the art presentation space and offices for our CORE staff here on campus. It recently opened two great reviews, the conference room itself is really spectacular. It's one of those rooms, you walk in and literally say, Wow, when you step foot into the room,
Ralph Ford:Yeah, it is a great addition to campus, and it will serve us well. As well as that that Outreach and Research Center and all the work that they do here in the community and built on the vision that Susan Hirt Hagen had as well as one of our faculty members, Dr. Carl Kallgren. It goes to show you what some great ideas will lead to if you invest in nurturing them. We're coming to the end of our time. What's next? What do we do next? In terms of fundraising, we're coming to the end of a campaign.
Kevin Moore:Well, you started off by talking about myths of fundraising. And there are a lot of them. I don't golf every day, I don't fly on jets. I don't drink bourbon 24 hours a day. Sometimes I feel like I might want to, but I don't. That's the stereotype. Those are some of the myths. The reality is that it is a 24/7 job that is really passion driven. I could be at Wegmans. And I ended up talking to a donor on a Sunday morning. It's just that that's the nature of the job. But I love the work that we do. Because fundraising really never stops around higher education, providing that access to students who can't afford it otherwise, providing resources to faculty who are doing great research and advancing things like women's health care. Cancer research in particular is a big passion area for us right now. So it just is very rewarding work. And as we move forward, it's the needs of the college that really drive the fundraising. It's not fundraising, per se, because it's not a bake sale. We don't sit around waiting for people and when they walk by ask them to make a gift. It's a cultivation process. As we talked about earlier, it's engaging people in that. And the magic happens when that donor's passion or that donor's idea aligns with what the college is doing, and then they have the resources to help really put a rocket under that that idea and send it into orbit.
Ralph Ford:Well, that is a great closing. Just very well said. Kevin, thank you so much for this conversation today. You are listening to Behrend Talks. I'm Dr. Ralph Ford. My guest today has been Kevin Moore, the director of Development and Alumni Relations here at Penn State Behrend. And again, congratulations on the conclusion of this campaign.
Kevin Moore:Thank you very much.