Your Gift Makes a Difference.

Your annual gift is immediately put to use to support teaching and learning here on campus. Your gift may enhance the campus learning environment by providing financial aid and scholarships for our students, along with adding computers or books to the library, or other areas of need for our students. Every gift, no matter the size or designation, serves a very specific and important purpose by enabling our faculty and students to better fulfill our mission of "empowering students to present the whole Gospel for the whole World through faith, reason and justice."

Quite literally, every part of Eastern benefits from your support. The most fundamental impact is on student scholarships and aid. Annual gifts also equip our science and computer labs, help to build the library collections, and maintain our beautiful grounds. If you received a scholarship, studied by the ponds, or had class in McInnis, then you have experienced the impact of Eastern Fund gifts.

While Eastern's endowment offsets the cost of student tuition on an average of $3,000 per student, the endowment still only covers about 4% of the University's annual operating budget. Eastern's success, therefore, depends heavily on the support of our alumni, parents and friends. Annual giving is sometimes called the "living endowment" because dollars are expended in their entirety in the year they are given. In that sense, donors know the full amount of their gifts are being used for educating today's students.

Large gifts are absolutely essential to Eastern's success. But so are more modest ones. Eastern now has more than 20,000 living alumni. Most of us will never make the cover of Forbes magazine. Many teachers, pastors and social workers, for example-choose our life's work for love, not money. But when our gifts are combined, they add up and provide critical support for the student-professor interaction that makes our University very special.

Yes, every gift makes a difference. Gifts of any size, particularly those made to the Eastern Fund, play a critical role in helping Eastern grow its ministry of higher education based on faith, reason and justice. Eastern relies on the support of alumni, parents and friends to help many of our students to attend. Further, many grant-making organizations assess alumni participation rates when making their grant decisions.