Big Gifts, big Impacts: USU breaks record of million-dollar-plus donations received
USU has received a record-breaking amount of seven-figure donations this year, including a $5 million donation from the Janet Quinney Lawson Foundation for the new S.J. & Jessie E. Quinney College of Agriculture & Natural Resources deanship.
Matthew White is the vice president for advancement and president of the USU Foundation Board.
“The record-breaking part of this year was the number of significant million-dollar-plus gifts that we received,” White said.
USU received $15 million-plus donations, including the Quinney Lawson Foundation and Mehdi Heravi.
“That’s going to be a $5 million endowment that the dean can use for his or her initiatives and priorities and helping with student support and so on,” White said. “They leveraged their previous gift of their naming opportunity and did an additional gift to do that.”
Heravi has had a major impact in donations to USU — he has more endowed scholarships than any individual across the entire university, according to White.
“He’s also giving now to the Mehdi Heravi Peace Institute, and many of his gifts have gone to that to really look at global peace and what we’re trying to accomplish there, but all that support really goes back to help our students,” White said.
Janette Robbins is in charge of marketing and communications for advancement and alumni engagement.
“We have a lot of development officers,” Robbins said. “They’re located throughout the university and within each of the colleges. We have some statewide, and they raise money for different units around the university and athletics too.”
Donations can be endowed or directed to certain colleges and athletics, like the QANR and Heravi Peace Institute, statewide campuses or programs, or they can go to the general donation fund that goes to serving students’ greatest needs.
“We want to link our donors’ passions with the priorities and strategic direction of the university,” White said. “So yes, donors can help decide where that is based on what things we want to want to accomplish.”
Major donators for the Caine School of the Arts invested in the newly merged college, according to White.
“We have to make sure that all of our previously endowed scholarships that support colleges and programs that might have been aligned with a different college are now realigned with the new college,” White said. “So we’ve had a very strategic and deliberate communication strategy with all of our donors to make sure that their donor intent is being carried out and doing that.”
White emphasized the recent strategic reinvestment plan has not affected the allocation or distribution of donations.
“Our donors have looked at this as an opportunity to help better address student needs and better address collaborations with faculty, not as much as, ‘Well, this is going away’ because it’s not going away — it’s just being realigned,” White said.
Nearly $10 million was created in university-wide student scholarships, according to White.
“There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes — processing gifts, making sure they’re handed out,” White said. “All those things that happen behind the scenes.”
College of Agriculture and Natural Resources on Oct. 14th, 2025
There were 9,587 donors this year, all of the donations coming together and surpassing the annual fundraising goal by $8.8 million from the previous year. The target fundraising goal continues to increase each year due to the continuous influx of donations, according to White.
“We had $10.9 million in donations that came in under the $25,000 level,” White said. “If you think of every donation that was made less than $25,000 — your $100 or $1,000 or $5,000 and so on — that total of $10.9 million is just incredible.”
The donors this year have had a major and profound impact on what White and Robbins’s fundraising teams have been trying to accomplish.
“We’re here to help our students and to help our faculty in doing that, and that’s what the power of philanthropy can do,” White said. “We have incredible advocates, advisers and investors in the university. We have a powerful Aggie family that is coming together, and we’re always looking to expand that.”
For those interested in learning about donating and USU’s “Create Your Aggie Impact,” an initiative-driven fundraising campaign on the USU Advancement website usu.edu/advancement.