Spring Kick-Off to Support What Matters

A May 19 kick-off event will launch Support What Matters, the next campaign for St. Norbert. The $125 million initiative is timed to align with the upcoming 125th anniversary of the college.

The college undertakes Support What Matters, a fundraising drive focused on SNC’s endowment, in service of an ambitious goal: to preserve, enhance and amplify the things that make a St. Norbert education unique – an education that is also uniquely important, in a complex and ever-evolving world.

President Brian Bruess ’90 says: “Pivoting from a really successful era of raising funds for facilities to focusing on our endowment is a bold move for an institution. It’s about the vibrancy and health of our beloved college. It’s about the intergenerational equity, and financial health and future of the college.

“Endowments speak to an institution’s reputational strength. Growing our endowment allows us to proudly and unapologetically count ourselves among the top 100 liberal arts colleges in the country. We’re a little outside of that right now, with our $190 million endowment. Given the quality of what we’re doing here at St. Norbert, we’d like to build up our endowment closer to $400 million.”

The Support What Matters campaign focuses on four priorities that reflect SNC’s commitment to supporting its students’ flourishing as they pursue their journeys of discovery at the college. These essentials for the college’s future strength are:

• Scholarships and financial aid – the means to extend opportunity to every qualified student.
• Contemporary student experiences – the path to an education of exceptional strength and breadth.
• Mission: Catholic, Norbertine, liberal arts – a commitment to honoring and furthering SNC’s legacy.
• Strategic innovation – funding for the programs and practices that will shape a thriving future for the institution.

With the campaign’s focus squarely on affordability and student experience in the context of a radiant, vital and well-loved mission, Bruess sees the campaign as a way to not only underpin what has always mattered at the college but also to remind the college’s friends of St. Norbert’s essence as an institution.

“It’s rare, I think, for an institution to be positioned at such a dynamic intersection as it begins a campaign,” Bruess says. “We’re an institution that is coming off a previous campaign that raised resources for facilities; an institution that is strong financially; and an institution with a strategic plan that focuses on initiatives that are nicely funded by an endowment. The convergence of these three aspects is really quite incredible.

“Think of our endowment as a long-term investment fund for our students, our college and our mission.”


At snc.edu/giving readers can find out more, donate or catch up on SNC stories of gifts given – and of those who benefit from them.

March 17, 2022