How does a $5 senior donation build a new chemistry lab? What does STEM have to do with my passion for the arts? Why is an updated fitness center considered innovative?
These are all questions floating around the school lately. As we embark on our fourth year of the five-year Campaign for Cary Academy, our community is asking all the right questions.
How do we help? Where do we fit? What are we doing?
To answer these questions, one needs to look no further than our vision statement:
Cary Academy will create learning opportunities that are flexible, personalized, and relevant. We will cultivate self-directed and bold life-long learners who make meaningful contributions to the world.
As we enter the final phases of the Campaign for Cary Academy, now more than ever, our vision defines our fundraising priorities and next steps.
The new building is important not only as a top-notch facility for math and sciences, but because it has created flexible learning spaces that are available to all students for group study, individual study, and interdisciplinary learning. Moreover, its completion represents the first domino, triggering a chain reaction of classroom transitions that will unlock significant opportunities to enhance and reconfigure other spaces to emphasize the value of the arts and humanities.
A renovated athletic fitness center offers opportunities, not only for physical fitness, but a chance to emphasize and highlight the importance of day-to-day healthy living in ways that are relevant to students’ lives.
Endowed support for faculty and students allows us to recruit and retain top-notch faculty with the required creativity and expertise to create personalized life-changing educational opportunities for well-deserving students. And to provide those faculty with transformational professional development opportunities that keep our programs on the leading edge of innovation and continually improve how we support our students.
Many members of our community have already stepped up to join us in fulfilling our fundraising goals. To date, we have secured $9.5M towards our $12M goal – and we still have two years left and numerous families considering their commitments. The generosity and thoughtfulness shown by our friends and supporters is humbling. All of us look forward to crossing this finish line together in 2020.
And to circle back – how does a $5 senior gift donation help to get us to our goals? Because it takes a community. Because a single student, reflecting on their experience and deciding to put $5 towards the CA Fund instead of Starbucks latte, sets a tone, an expectation, a signal for others. It contributes to a community ethos of giving. And that’s powerful.
At the heart of philanthropic giving is an understanding that it is not about the money, per se, but a commitment to a mission and to what giving can do. How it reflects a shared commitment to an idea. To a community. And to a shared vision of the future.
As a community, if we believe in that shared future, and we express that belief by giving what we can, we can make that vision a reality. Together, we can carry Cary Academy forward as the leader in discovery, innovation, collaboration, and excellence that we all know it to be.
