Your Impact

The Western Fund: President Sabah Randhawa uses gifts to the Western Fund to meet areas of greatest need and emergent funding requests so our faculty and students can seize opportunities for travel, research and other scholarly activities as they arise. Recent examples include an investment in an adviser to help students apply for Fulbright awards, emergency grants to our neediest students and support for a project honoring the forgotten female poet, Ella Higginson.

Scholarships: Gifts to WWU's scholarship fund provide awards to our neediest and most deserving students, representing all grades, and distributed to students participating in all areas of study, including students who have not declared a major yet and recruitment scholarships to attract the talented students to come to Western.

To the State of Washington

More than 84 percent of Western students stay and work in Washington upon graduation, contributing to their communities, economies and environments. But higher education costs have shifted from the state to our students and their families. Those increased costs mean more students are taking on more debt, which they take into the world with them when they begin their careers.

Washington has an ever-growing demand for talented employees in interdisciplinary fields of the new energy economy, engineering and computer science. When you ask our state's largest employers such as Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon and Google, they tell you Western graduates are prepared and immediately productive upon hiring in these fields. Support of students in these programs will help ensure the state has a robust pool of talented leaders, so employers don't have to search out of state to fill vacant positions or take their enterprises elsewhere.

To the World

Students come to Western to pursue a high-quality education built on strong liberal arts foundation. They uncover existing opportunities, create new ones, and take advantage of every resource available to graduate from Western as critical thinkers capable of solving complex problems. They go on to become change-makers.

Access to knowledge alone is not enough, a well-rounded liberal arts education includes courses that engage students in civil discourse, teaching them to evaluate and challenge the status quo so they can become great community and world leaders. Western will continue to graduate global citizens who are inspired to provoke change through these educational experiences.

In order to emphasize continuous improvement on the promise behind Western’s tagline “Active Minds, Changing Lives,” we need financial backing to implement the following essential themes: leadership, global perspectives, sustainability, innovation and ethical reasoning.