UVA continues to meet fundraising goals

BOV’s Advancement Committee learns about Cavalier Fund 

The Charlottesville Community Engagement newsletter covers local and regional government in the area as well as the University of Virginia. UVA is governed by a 17-member Board of Visitors whose members are appointed by the Governor. The body meets quarterly, though there were two emergency meetings in February. 

Other than the Health System Board, the first committee meeting of the BOV’s March 2025 meeting was for the group tasked with making recommendations on fundraising. On March 6, the Advancement Committee got an update from UVA’s vice president of advancement. (meeting book) (meeting presentation)

“As we look at the fiscal year to date, as far as total commitments, as of today, we have crossed $475 million in total commitments so far since July 1st of last year,” said Mark Luellen. “That’s slightly above our pace from last year and about a little bit over 25 percent higher than our five year average in total commitments for this point of the year.”

Luellen said that’s ahead of pace for the fiscal year, but so far there have been no gifts in excess of $50 million. 

“And as of today we’re at about 80 gifts of a million dollars or more since June 30th, with obviously a few months to go,” Luellen said.

Another fundraising highlight is that the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences have surpassed their goal of $750 million.  Luellen also said there have now been over 252,000 individual gifts to the “Honor the Future” campaign. While there are very large gifts, they’re in the minority.

“Ninety-seven percent of the total gifts have come from gifts of $10,000 or less and 94 percent are from $5,000 or less,” Luellen said.

The Advancement Committee also heard about the Cavalier Fund, a philanthropic effort to help cover the costs for some students to be able to have a full experience at the University of Virginia. Kenyon Bonner has been the vice president and chief student affairs officer at UVA for just over a year. 

“The Cav Fund, for short, was established to ensure that every undergraduate student has access to similar holistic educational experiences while attending uva regardless of their financial resources,” Bonner said. “And this includes access to activities not usually covered by other student funding resources such as extracurricular activities, student recreational experiences, CIO fraternity and sorority membership, service opportunities and spring break opportunities.”

The fund disbursed $95,623 in the fall of 2024. Recipients can receive up to $1,000 per academic year for support and must demonstrate financial need. Bonner said this can open up opportunities for students who otherwise could not participate. 

“There were 182 student fund funding request for support in the fall and the approval rate was nearly 75 percent,” Bonner said. “And the average payment for each student was $669 per student.”

One of the recipients is Lukas Lehman, a fourth-year in biomedical engineering whose mother is a public school teacher and whose father is a restaurant manager. 

“I came to UVA and I quickly learned that education expands far beyond the classroom, which is amazing, but also that comes at a financial cost,” Lehman said. “I was lucky enough to join a lot of organizations on grounds like Engineering Student Council or the Honor Committee where there is no membership fee.”

However, Lehman applied for the fund to help cover the costs of joining the Phi Delta Theta fraternity and has risen to become its president. In that position, he’s helped the group do more for the town. 

“I increased our involvement with Habitat for Humanity in the community and we started volunteering a lot more with them,” Lehman said. 

Abel Alexander is a first year student in computer science. He applied for funding to attend a “hackathon” conference at Harvard University last October.  

“Hackathon is just a 24 to 48 hour coding competition where the main objective is to create a computer software project that can foster a positive impact in the community,” Alexander said. 

The project he and his team worked on sought to improve the user interface for emergency communications dispatchers. He specifically used the Cavalier Fund to help pay for airfare to Boston. 

The next story in this series will be from the Buildings and Grounds Committee.

Before you go: This story was published first to this website because it is a Saturday and there may not be an edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement. This will go in the next one, which could be the afternoon but could also be on Monday. Either way, it is the first of several stories to come out of the March 2025 meeting of the Board of Visitors. There’s a big story that happened at the meeting, but Town Crier Productions seeks to be thorough and starts at the beginning of the tape.