WHAT YOUR DOLLARS CAN DO

Students performing during the skit competition at the 2008
UIC Germanic Studies High School Day

All Gifts, Big and Small, Create Opportunities Throughout the College

If you are a donor, you probably already understand that private giving to LAS has tangible impact for our students, faculty, and the communities we serve. If you are considering giving, you may wonder what type of impact a donation has in the College. But donors, and non-donors alike, often question how a donation is used, where it goes and how much impact is actually realized.  

All gifts, big and small, create opportunities throughout the College. No gift is too small, because collectively, donations can blossom into funding for great programs, cutting-edge equipment or student awards. Following are examples of what your dollars can do in LAS. We hope you're inspired by the many ways you can significantly benefit the College.

What Can $25 Provide?

• The Department of Germanic Studies recently hosted a special reading by Austrian novelist Elisabeth Reichart, winner of numerous literary prizes and one of the most important and provocative writers to emerge from postwar Austria. The expenses for this special reading totaled $1,000 which means this event can be supported with only forty $25 gifts to the department.
  
  

What Can $50 Provide?

• The Department of Germanic Studies also hosted its High School Day event bringing 400 students from 20 area high schools to campus. Held to foster interest in German studies, the students participated in German-speaking competitions while high school teachers learned pedagogical tools for teaching German to their students. Surprisingly, $2,000 supported this entire event which could be held again with only forty $50 gifts to the department.
  
  
• The same amount of funding can provide the Department of Biological Sciences with peptide synthesis and antibody generation, materials used to isolate allergic reactions and their causes in host animals.
  
  

What Can a $100 Gift Achieve?

• The Department of Political Science’s Mock Trial Program runs a full year and is one of the longest-running and most successful and winning programs at UIC. The Mock Trial team, which has competed nationally for the last 13 years, is comprised of two different teams (a total of about 25 students) who compete on the local, state, and national levels. $6,000 funds the Mock Trial Program for one year meaning that the program can be held fully-funded with only sixty $100 gifts.
  
  

What Happens With Bigger Gifts?

• Ten $500 gifts can support the Department of English in employing a graduate student
  
  A tutor assists a student in the Writing Center of the Sandi Port
  Errant Language and Culture Learning Center
  
  
  tutor for one full semester in the Writing Center of the Sandi Port Errant Language and Culture Learning Center. Tutors assist students in writing better and in completing essays required in their classes in all disciplines. An undergraduate tutor is paid from $500 to $1,000 a semester.
  
  
• On a higher scale, $25,000 paid for a Department of Biological Sciences four-day interdisciplinary symposium that brought together evolutionary biologists, developmental biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists and bio-philosophers to examine the evolution of developmental systems required for intelligent behavior. Another four-day symposium like this can be supported with twenty-five $1,000 gifts.
  
  
• For that same amount of funding, an endowed scholarship can be established that will perpetually award a student with much-needed
  
  An example of student and faculty research collaboration:
  fluorescence micrograph showing the transcription factor
  PHA-5 (pink) in nuclei (blue) in the nematode C. elegans
  
  
  assistance. This past year, Elizabeth English's $50,000 gift provided the Department of Anthropology with two awards, an undergraduate scholarship and a graduate award in Anthropology.
  
  
• Six $5,000 gifts can provide the Department of Biological Sciences with a $30,000 fluorescence-equipped binocular microscope, which allows faculty and students to identify, examine, sort and study very small genetically modified animals, those that are about 1 millimeter in length.
  
  

No matter what your giving level, your gifts have significant impact. You can positively affect the education of students, from one to thousands, in many ways on many levels. They, and we, appreciate every gift we receive.