Nature & Nurture | Giving News

Paying it Forward
Through Gifts of All Sizes to the Alumni Fellowship Endowment,
Alumni Can Help Current Students Make the Most of a Nicholas School Education

By Laura Ertel

It helped Joel Dunn craft environmental legislation on Capitol Hill. Miranda Smith used it to cover expenses during her NatureServe internship last summer and to pay for travel to a coastal Geotools conference this spring. Terah Donovan found it helped her dedicate more time to her leadership roles at the Nicholas School.

Each of these Master of Environmental Management (MEM) students received a Nicholas School Alumni Fellowship—and each found it invaluable in making the most of their educational experience at Duke University.

The Nicholas School Alumni Fellowship Endowment Fund was established in 1987 by alumni and friends in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of Duke’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (which later was joined with the Duke Marine Lab and the geology department to become the Nicholas School). Brian Payne F’62, the Alumni Council president at the time, was the first contributor.

The fund is designed to provide fellowships to several graduate students in the Master of Environmental Management and Master of Forestry programs each year. The Alumni Council administers the program, reviewing applications, interviewing candidates and selecting the recipients. Students apply for the merit-based partial fellowships—three this year—in the spring of their first year.

Recipients are announced at the annual student spring banquet. Students can use the funds—generally up to $4,000— toward second-year tuition, to cover expenses related to attending school or toward a summer research project or studyrelated travel. The Alumni Fellowship Endowment Fund also funds minority student fellowships for incoming students to help increase the diversity of the student body. Minority candidates include students of color, students with disabilities or students of nontraditional age.

Small gifts add up
One of the most remarkable things about the Alumni Fellowship Endowment Fund, notes Deirdre Gordon, assistant director of development, is that it has been supported largely through small gifts from alumni and friends. Together, these gifts of $25, $50 or $100, have made a huge impact. Combined with several leadership gifts, these contributions have been invested by Duke, with the fund’s principal growing to more than $180,000 in June 2006.

“People often think they can’t make a difference if they can’t make a large gift, but this fund shows the power that many smaller gifts can make when added together,” says Gordon. “This combined generosity has resulted in a huge benefit to our students.”

Leadership gifts provide boost
Jim Miller, a 1970 Master of Forestry graduate, is one of the biggest supporters of the Alumni Fellowship Endowment Fund and has consistently made gifts to the fellowship since 1996. A former Alumni Council president and recent retiree from the USDA Forest Service, Miller likes the idea that the fellowships are funded by previous students to help current students.

“I received a little help when I was in school, and I have the ability to give back, so it just seemed like the right thing to do,” he says.

He hopes that recipients of the fellowships will “put it to good use. Hopefully, it will be a benefit for the school, and a benefit for society,” he says.

Much-needed financial assistance
When he applied to the joint graduate programs at the Nicholas School and Duke’s Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, Joel Dunn MEM/MPP ’04 knew he couldn’t attend unless he got as much financial assistance as possible. He heard about the Alumni Fellowship and applied as soon as he could. Receiving the fellowship, along with several others, made his Duke education possible.

“I’m really grateful to have received the award,” says Dunn, who graduated with Master of Environmental Management and Master of Public Policy degrees. “It enabled me to spend more time on my educational pursuits and contributed to my enthusiasm for conservation leadership. It also bolstered my belief in myself, because someone else recognized my effort and my potential. The fellowship started me on a great career trajectory.”

Dunn’s “trajectory” began as a Nicholas School student with a three-month fellowship in Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s office on Capitol Hill, where Dunn helped draft the Long Island Sound Stewardship Act, a $100 million initiative to protect ecologically valuable sites around the sound. The bill passed in the House and Senate and became law last fall. Dunn, the Chesapeake associate at The Conservation Fund in Arlington, Va., scored a second legislative coup last December when Congress passed a bill establishing the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail as part of the National Trails System. The 2,300 mile trail travels up almost every major tributary of the Chesapeake Bay and is the nation’s first all-water National Historic Trail. Dunn now coordinates the conservation, education and recreation strategies associated with the trail.

Attending an important conference
Second-year MEM student Miranda Smith has put her meritbased Alumni Fellowship to work to help finance her summer internship with NatureServe, a nonprofit conservation organization headquartered in Virginia, and for a trip to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Coastal Geotools 2007 conference in South Carolina this past March.

Designing her own internship over the summer and providing essentially “free work” to the nonprofit because she was able to take care of her own expenses through her Alumni and Doris Duke fellowships has led to a collaboration with the group to support her masters project. Her real-world project will involve analyzing confidential information from a draft Puerto Rican national land-use plan to determine resulting ecosystem changes.

In March, Smith traveled to the NOAA conference in South Carolina to present the research she did for NatureServe last summer.

“Attending this conference was more important to me than my masters project, honestly. It was a chance to present information to my peers and maybe my future employers about how ecologists and economists are thinking spatially about ecosystems and subsequently valuing them,” she says.

Smith received funding from NatureServe for the hotel and the Nicholas School’s Career Services office took care of the conference fee; the Alumni Fellowship helped pay for travel and expenses. “Having money to do this allowed me to network with spatial tool users and developers from all over the country. I also had the opportunity to attend a week’s worth of talks and workshops about the state of the art that I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else,” she says. “I am grateful and honored that the alumni were willing to help me.”

More time to build relationships, experience
For second-year MEM student Terah Donovan, the biggest value of the Alumni Fellowship has been freeing up her time. “Last year I worked 10 hours a week, but with the fellowship, I had the option not to work. That has allowed me to focus more time on my studies and on the leadership positions I have within the school, and to spend more time establishing relationships with classmates that hopefully will last beyond my years at Duke,” she says.

Donovan, who returned to graduate school after serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bolivia, is one of the older students at the Nicholas School. Having spent time out in the world before returning to academia, she believes that actively engaging in the community and developing leadership skills are as important for graduate students as classroom studies. She says, “The Alumni Fellowships provide an opportunity for students to look up from their studies and say: ‘There’s something else I can be doing here.’”

Donovan is the alumni relations representative on the Student Council and an organizer of the Forestry and Environmental Management Professional Social Group. She helped plan the September 2006 Hindsight is 20/20 conference, in which alumni returned to campus to share their experience with current students. She also is involved in the Working Group on Environment in Latin America.

After graduating this May, Donovan plans to go into consulting, with a long-term goal of working in international conservation. “The fellowship has allowed me to interact more with alumni. Talking with them has helped me voice what I want to do and think more about my career trajectory,” she says.

Revitalizing the Alumni Fellowship
This year’s Alumni Council, led by President Amy Schick Kenney BS’96, MEM’98, is launching an awareness and fundraising effort to increase the principal in the Alumni Fellowship Endowment Fund so additional awards can be made in the future.

“It has been many years since the council has actively raised funds for the Alumni Fellowship Endowment, so many Nicholas School alumni may not even be aware that it exists,” says Kenney. “Contributing to this fellowship is a wonderful way for those of us who have benefited from a Nicholas School education to assist current students in pursuing their education. The recipients of our merit-based fellowships are incredible students who have really taken advantage of their education, so it is nice to honor them and recognize their efforts.”

This summer, alumni of the Nicholas School and its predecessors will receive a letter encouraging them to contribute to the Alumni Fellowship Endowment Fund. The Alumni Council’s goal is to increase the endowment to provide several additional or more substantial merit-based fellowships as well as fellowships for minority students.

What makes contributions to the Alumni Fellowship Endowment Fund different is the permanency of the gifts, says Kenney. The fund is a pooled endowment, meaning that all gifts to the fund will be permanent resources for the fellowships.

“Adding fellowships will increase funding opportunities for students, including those who might not otherwise have the resources to attend the Nicholas School, and will help foster a diverse student population at the school,” Kenney notes. “Even a small gift makes a huge difference for a student. We would love to be able to provide many more fellowships, and hopefully this fundraising effort will enable us to do that.”

To find out more or to contribute to the Nicholas School Alumni Fellowship Endowment Fund, contact Deirdre Gordon at 919-613-8019 or deirdre.gordon@duke.edu.

Laura Ertel is a freelance writer based in Durham, N.C.