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Imagine the profound impact scholarships have on students
Imagine the profound impact scholarships have on students

In 2023, your gifts funded $52 million in scholarships and fellowships, including the prestigious Chancellor's Award at CU Boulder. 

Hear three award recipients share their aspirations, academic pursuits and long-term goals.

 

“My big dream was to make some sort of contribution to the MS community… just to make even one person’s life with MS a little bit better. And I feel like I’ve actually been able to accomplish that… so now I need to dream a little bit bigger.”

‍ Brodie Woodall, CU Boulder ’23

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Why not do what’s right by veterans?

A CU Boulder bridge program is helping veterans transition to university life.

Why not do what’s right by veterans?

A CU Boulder bridge program is helping veterans transition to university life.

When Joey Morgan stepped foot on the CU Boulder campus in summer 2019, he felt like a 44-year-old stuck in a 24-year-old’s body.

Just one year before, Morgan had completed a tour of duty in Syria, fighting alongside the U.S. Army’s Kurdish allies and witnessing the lead-up to the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East.

“War was like a fever dream,” Morgan says.


Welcoming Veterans to Campus

Kristina Spaeth, an academic advisor at CU Boulder’s Veteran and Military Affairs (VMA) office, says it is common for veterans like Morgan to feel out of place when they return to school. Spaeth has spent the last decade working with veterans who fought in the Global War on Terror including the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The veterans enrolled in college utilizing the Post 9/11 GI Bill.

These are people who have sacrificed so much of themselves for the rest of us. The very least that we can do is to treat them right and do the right thing for them. Why not do the right thing?
– Kristina Spaeth, Academic Advisor

Her work serves the VMA’s overarching mission, which is to support student veterans and their dependents and provide them with information and assistance with their GI Bill benefits. Through her work at the VMA, Spaeth realized that veterans needed a bridge program to help them acclimate to academic and social life on campus before starting classes.

Kristina Spaeth, VMA academic advisor, discusses course selection with Connor Greenberg, a bridge program participant and CU Boulder student

Kristina Spaeth, VMA academic advisor, discusses course selection with Connor Greenberg, a bridge program participant and CU Boulder student.

 

“These are people who have sacrificed so much of themselves for the rest of us,” Spaeth says. “The very least that we can do is to treat them right and do the right thing for them. At the time, creating the bridge program from nothing felt like the biggest challenge I’d ever encountered in my career, but it was like, ‘Why not do the right thing?’”

Working with Stewart Elliott, director of the VMA, Spaeth garnered the university’s support and launched the two-week summer bridge program in summer 2017 with 18 students.

Since then, the program has added a winter session and more than doubled in size, with 40 students in its 2021 summer cohort. The program provides intensive classes that enhance math, writing and research skills while also offering the opportunity for incoming veterans to network and form friendships.

Five years in, the bridge program is showing encouraging outcomes. Students who complete the program have a higher GPA and retention rate than those who do not.


Funding for Success

Private donor funding has helped the VMA grow over the years. Today, the office offers a range of services and support, including scholarships and student aid, career support, academic advising, tutoring, events and programming, a student ambassador program and more.

 

Student veterans study in the VMA student lounge

Student veterans study in the VMA student lounge.

 

“We are extremely fortunate to have significant financial support from foundations and private donors,” Elliott says. “This support has clearly transformed the CU Boulder VMA into a world class program supporting student veterans and veteran dependents who attend CU Boulder.”

As philanthropic support for the VMA has grown, so has support for the bridge program.

Spaeth says the program initially ran on a small budget from the university, but over time its success began to attract funding from private donors and organizations such as The Anschutz Foundation.  

“I think our donors saw that we were doing the right thing for veterans,” Spaeth says.  

Today, the bridge program is entirely donor funded. Philanthropic support enables the program to provide a $1,000 stipend to every student who completes the two-week program, up to 80 students each semester. In addition, donor support allows the program to compensate faculty and instructors who teach, speak on panels and connect with students.


Finding Purpose

Through the bridge program and other VMA programs, Morgan made friends and connected with civilians and veterans.

“At first, I didn’t know if I could effectively get along with civilians,” says Morgan, who is majoring in psychology. “But over time, I realized that there are people who want to know what we’ve been through in the service and that friends can be from anywhere, from different walks of life and any age from 25 to 75.”

That sense of belonging gave Morgan the confidence to forge ahead on an idea he had while visiting the grave of a friend’s father at Fort Logan National Cemetery in 2021.

“It was around the time that we were hearing about how the Taliban had taken over Afghanistan,” Morgan says. “While I was at the cemetery, the thought struck that we need a place that people will gravitate to, where they can reflect on what happened in the two decades, where veterans and civilians alike can mourn and remember the sacrifices of the survivors and the fallen – a place where we can meet in the middle, on common ground.”

After Morgan spoke to faculty involved with the bridge program about his idea, they connected him to the Global War on Terror Memorial Foundation and their plans for a war memorial on the National Mall in Washington D.C.

 

Joey Morgan at Old Main on the CU Boulder campus

Joey Morgan at Old Main on the CU Boulder campus

 

Morgan is now serving as a veteran advisor for the memorial. He hopes to contribute to the memorial’s design, which currently includes bas-relief sculptures, photo galleries, plaques with the names of those who died in the war and a garden with flowers and plants from the Middle East such as tulips, jasmine and irises.  

“The hope is that when someone visits who has been in these wars, they’ll feel a sense of recognition when they see the flowers,” Morgan says.

Spaeth says it keeps her motivated to see veterans like Morgan find a sense of purpose and place on campus.  

“Some find lifelong friendships. They do club sports together and spend holidays together,” she says. “That’s why it’s so personally rewarding to do this work.”

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Taking pride in talking, listening to each other

What’s something about you that most people wouldn’t know if they were looking right at you?

Garrett Rose briefly considered the question and then wrote:

I get depressed a lot.

“I either didn’t know what to say or didn’t understand the question,” Garrett, now a senior at CU Boulder, recalls.

That was in early 2014 during an ice-breaker training session for the campus’ Gender and Sexuality Center. His peers didn’t think about it so deeply.

“Everyone else was like, ‘I have three dogs at home,’ ” he remembers.  

Garrett learned his answer wasn’t too personal.

“Somebody afterward said that my sadness was welcomed here,” he says. “It was one of the moments where I felt like I could be myself. I didn’t have to ignore what I was.”

He took that lesson seriously, and soon discovered that talking about who he is would define his CU Boulder experience. He came out as gay while in college. He engaged the campus community--“getting involved gave me a bigger sense that being gay was OK.” And he started pouring much of his time into the Gender and Sexuality Center, where he volunteered as a freshman before joining its small seasonal staff.

The Center promotes equal opportunity and supportive environments for LGBTQIA students, faculty and staff.

But Garrett says its goal is often simpler: “Allow people to talk. And listen to them.”

The Center’s reach is significant. It welcomes more than 15 visitors each day during the school year, and impacts more than 3,000 students, faculty, staff, graduates and community members annually with its programs. It offered nearly 100 educational sessions in the 2015-16 school year, including safe-zone trainings and peer education about gender and sexuality issues. Staff and volunteers talk with students and others outside the Center if they’re not comfortable visiting. And online tools allows visitors to interact with staff anonymously.   

Garrett says it’s vital that the Center doesn’t just serve the LGBTQIA community; it will reach any person or group that wants to ally with the Center’s goals.

For its efforts, the Campus Pride organization ranks CU Boulder among the nation’s top universities for its dedication to LGBTQIA students.

That outreach and success gets people talking: about their identity, about their campus, about their community. That builds a more welcoming environment, Garrett says.

“It feels like a home,” he says. “It feels like a community.”

CU Boulder
Before there was the state of Colorado, there was the University of Colorado.

Before there was CU, a courageous and tenacious few were so profoundly committed to the transformative power of an education.

The idea of a public university in the young Colorado territory was considered a valuable and worthwhile pursuit as early as 1861. But political disputes, economic distress and local jealousies stalled the idea from becoming a reality for years. Some folks clamored that Colorado didn’t have any use for an academic institution.

But some early settlers never gave up.

First, there was the gift of land. Three Boulder families—Marinus and Annie Smith, George and Mary Andrews, and Anthony and Mary Arnett—collectively donated 51 acres of land on the heights south of Boulder Creek, which was formally accepted in January 1872 by the legislature as the permanent location of the future university.

Funds were still needed for a university building. Bitter rivalries among Colorado’s lawmakers, who wanted their communities selected instead as the home for a public university, continued to embroil the idea for another two years. Then, in January 1874, the Colorado Territorial Legislature agreed to provide $15,000, a sizeable sum in those days, toward a university on the condition Boulder citizens contribute an equal amount.

David Nichols, the territory’s speaker of the house and a Boulder resident, realized he needed to immediately raise the necessary funds, lest his town lose the opportunity.

Legend has it, Nichols said: “If $15,000 is what they want, we’ll get it.”  

Like Paul Revere, he rode by horseback that cold and rainy January night for five hours the 30 miles between Denver to Boulder to knock on the doors of ordinary citizens to see if they could—if they would—donate the money.

The fate of CU hung in the balance.

By the time a weary Nichols was back at his legislative seat in Denver the next morning, Boulder residents—104 parties, to be exact—had pledged the funds needed to secure the University of Colorado, and the appropriation bill passed.

Collectively, the citizens of Boulder committed a total of $16,806.66—more than enough to give the fledgling university a permanent home. Pledges ranged from $15 to $1,000. More than half the donors contributed fewer than $100. Finally, after long years of struggle, the University of Colorado was more than an idea—it had sufficient funds to begin the construction of the first university building.

On Sept. 20, 1875, the cornerstone for Old Main was laid. By the following spring, CU officially opened its doors, five months before the Centennial State joined the union in 1876.

After 15 years of effort, and though these early philanthropic contributions placed a true hardship on Boulder’s frontier families, their commitment to education remains an enduring testament to what CU stands for to this day.

It is a legacy upon which we continue to build and honor.

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Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

Four days of holiday break and every campus cafeteria was closed. It was Thanksgiving 1985, and Tandean Rustandy had $5 to his name.

He had nowhere to go for the holiday. CU Boulder’s dorms were still open, which meant he could relax over the long weekend, albeit alone, in his room at Libby Hall. So he took that $5, walked to a grocery store, bought a raw chicken and a bag of rice, and cooked four days of meals with a rice cooker in his dorm room.

He felt lucky. Tandean classTandean was an undergraduate business student from Indonesia and the first in his family to get a college education. His working-class parents, with only middle-school educations, helped pay for it by selling their house back in their village. He worked three jobs in Boulder—one of them washing pots and pans in Nichols Hall for $3.25 an hour—and only got haircuts twice a year. He borrowed money from his college roommate to pay his last tuition bill. But he felt lucky to have the American college experience, rooting for the Colorado Buffs football team and going to the popular college bar Tulagi with friends.

“One of the best times of my life is in Boulder. The best. The best,” Tandean says.

When he graduated from CU in 1987, only his mother attended ceremonies because his parents could afford just one plane ticket to the United States. It was at his mother’s urging, after all, that Tandean studied at CU in the first place.

“Education is everything,” she would remind him.

Now Tandean is the one reminding CU Boulder students that education unlocks possibilities.

As the founder and chief executive officer of one of the world’s most successful ceramic-tile manufacturing companies, Tandean supports the Leeds School of Business, both philanthropically and philosophically.

He has twice hosted groups of CU students in Jakarta through the Leeds School’s Global Initiatives program, where undergraduates learn about business and culture in a global marketplace while supporting the local community, a mission close to Tandean’s heart. He invests in the university to lead the charge in entrepreneurship education. He mentors students about giving their best, today in their academics and in the future as alumni.

“This school really means a lot to me. Who I am today is because of the very strong foundation I received at CU Boulder,” says Tandean, who was honored in 2014 with a Leeds School alumni service award. “I share with the CU students that the quality of this school depends on you. As student, as an alum, you need to create something.”

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