Dear Trustees,

It always feels so rewarding to experience a UAA Commencement Day, and it’s especial-ly poignant in the midst of a budget crisis.

This spring, UAA graduated a total of 1,439 students in the Class of 2016—1,327 from the Anchorage campus and the rest from the Mat-Su, Kodiak, Valdez and Kenai campuses, joining the ranks of nearly 50,000 UAA alumni.

We watched 728 of our students walk in spring commencement ceremonies at the Alaska Airlines Center.

Our students achieved an incredible milestone in their lives and will move into the world with the ex-pertise they need to enrich the lives of communities here in Alaska and in our nation and world.

We will soon be confronting the challenge of painful state funding cuts. Students and their education and training remain our topmost priorities as we continue to move through the process of making necessary choices.

More UAA students than ever applied for scholar-ship assistance for the 2016-2017 academic year, which means fundraising now is more vitally import-ant than ever.

Though we’ve been working through many difficulties, there are still so many amazing things happening at UAA. I’m proud to share some of them with you here.

Thank you for all you do for UAA. Best regards,

UAA Chancellor

UAA spring commencement is the culmination of many amazing student stories, aided in large part by the many donors who support our mission.

College of Health gets senior development officerGregory Gallagher is now serving as UAA’s senior development officer for the College of Health. He previously worked as an as-sociate with Isaacson, Miller in Washington, D.C., and received his education at Claremont McKenna College and Harvard University Graduate School of Education.

CCEL forum honors studentsThe Center for Community Engagement and Learning’s (CCEL) Community Engagement Forum featured awards to students and faculty and highlights of its community partnerships.

Isaac Yep, a UAA mechanical engineering un-dergraduate student, received the Alex Hills En-gineering & Civic Engagement Award to build a prototype STEM educational instrument.

Jana Lekanoff, an anthropology undergrad-uate student, received the Second Bridge Award to develop her project, “Place Names of Unalaska Island,” focusing on the numerous and changing place names for water and ter-restrial features on the landscape.

The poster session reception provided an opportunity for guests to talk to community engaged student assistants about their faculty-community partner projects—rang-ing from the importance of play for preschoolers to realizing solutions for climate change.

Isaac Yep

Jana Lekanoff

Chancellor’sSummer 2016

Selected gifts to UAA (of $10,000 or more given since March 2016)

Corporate and Foundation DonorsExxonMobil donated a total of $415,000 to support the Alaska Native Science & Engineering Program General Support fund, ANSEP Middle School Academies and the 2016 ExxonMobil Bernard Harris Summer Science Camp.

Atwood Foundation contributed $200,000 toward its pledge to support the Robert B. Atwood Chair of Journalism.

Wells Fargo pledged $180,000 to support the Building Futures fund for Seawolf Athletics and donated $15,000 to Lemonade Day Alaska.

Alyeska Pipeline Service Company donated $175,000 to support the Alaska Native Science & Engineering Program General Support fund.

Northrim gave $160,000 to benefit ISER’s work in state fiscal policy modeling, the Alaska Small Business Development Center, UAA’s award-winning Speech and Debate team and its Chris Knudson Northrim Accounting Scholarship. 

Providence Health & Services Alaska donated $70,000 to support PWSC’s healthcare-related learning programs and careers in the Valdez area.

Alaska Kidney Foundation donated $40,404 to award Alaska Kidney Foundation scholarships and an additional $7,577 to the School of Nursing for renal course development and scholarships.

Council of Alaska Producers donated $30,855 to support the Visiting Professor of Public Policy.

ConocoPhillips Alaska donated $25,000 to the ANSEP Summer Bridge program.

LGL Alaska Research Associates donated $15,000 to the LGL Alaska Graduate Ecology Research Award.

Saltchuk donated $20,000 to the Alaska Native Science & Engineering Program General Support fund.

International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics donated $13,130 to support the CBPP Experimental Economics Laboratory General Support fund.

Individual DonorsEdward and Mary Jane Phelps contributed at the Leadership Circle giving level ($20,000 or greater) to support the Frank and Jennie Clark Memorial Scholarship.

Joseph E. Usibelli and Peggy Shumaker donated at the Aurora Circle giving level ($10,000-$19,999) to the Eva Saulitis Endowment Scholarship.

Donor EventsCollege of Engineering - Donors gathered with their scholarship recipients to get acquainted and share lunch in late April.

Parrish Bridge Dedication - Al and Ann Parrish were joined by 80 family members and friends as UAA dedicated the Parrish Bridge on Feb. 24 to honor them for their decades of support and partnership.

College of Fellows - University Advancement partnered with the Undergraduate Research & Discovery Symposium mid-April to cele- brate undergraduate research and invite leadership donors to a special dinner.

Phonathon exceeds spring goalNow in its 12th year, the UAA Student Pho-nathon started calling alumni the week of Sept. 20, 2015, raising $77,800 in the fall and $50,000 in the spring.

The money went to excellence programs within UAA’s colleges, and funded many stu-dent scholarships.

UAA CCEL joins LBG philanthropy projectUAA, through its civic engagement certificate program in the Center for Community Engage-ment and Learning, recently joined a national philanthropy project supported by the Learning by Giving Foundation. An ongoing grant from LBG, along with local dollars from the Atwood Foundation and The Foraker Group, made this project possible.

UAA students join students from 42 other in-stitutions across the country in learning about nonprofits and philanthropy and awarding grants to local organizations. The LBG Foun-dation asks colleges and universities to award $10,000 each year, and students determine who should receive the money.

UAA’s advanced civic engagement class re-cently awarded $2,500 each to four communi-ty organizations: AWAIC (Abused Women’s Aid in Crisis), STAR (Standing Together Against Rape), Children’s Lunchbox and Mountain View Boys & Girls Club.

Selkregg winner researches African American history UAA history professor Ian Hartman won the 2016 Selkregg Com-munity Engagement & Service Learning Award.

He will collaborate with his community partner, Cook Inlet Historical Society, in continuing research into the history of African Americans in Southcen-tral Alaska. His goal: to preserve oral histo-ries from African Americans who migrated to Alaska years ago, and use archived accounts to learn what life here was like for African Americans facing obstacles like housing and employment discrimination.

Ian Hartman