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Faculty member stretches her scholarship gift

First-time donors giving to Portland State student scholarships can watch their dollars go twice as far, thanks to a new challenge grant from the James F. & Marion L. Miller Foundation.

The Miller Scholarship Challenge is part of a $1 million gift made in November that pushed the University’s Building Our Future campaign past the $100 million milestone—eight months ahead of schedule. This is not the first time the University has exceeded its goal; an initial goal of $90 million was raised to $100 million during the quiet phase of the campaign, while a feasibility study at the campaign’s outset recommended a goal of $75 million.

Portland State President Dan Bernstine says that $750,000 of the Miller Foundation’s gift will go toward purchase of real estate adjacent to campus, providing urgently needed additional classrooms and office facilities. The remaining $250,000 will fund the scholarship challenge, directly boosting one of the campaign’s top priorities for its closing months. Building Our Future calls for new scholarship funds throughout the University. Campaign gifts for scholarships are expected to exceed $18 million before the campaign concludes in June 2006.

“The Miller Scholarship Challenge offers us an enormous opportunity,” says Bernstine. “Portland State serves a lot of students with severe financial need.”

Significant numbers of PSU students are the first in their families to go to college. Many are financially independent from their parents and may even have dependents of their own. A scholarship can be a decisive factor in their academic success.

“It’s our mission as a public university to open the door to any student who has the desire to learn, regardless of their ability to pay,” Bernstine says. “The Miller Challenge and the gifts it will inspire represent a major investment in our region’s future prosperity and quality of life.”

“Education was one of the most important things that ever happened to me,” says Laura Burney Nissen (pictured above), Portland State faculty member. “Now I want to invest in others and help make their world better.”

Thanks to the James F. & Marion L. Miller Foundation, Nissen can fulfill her wish to create an endowed scholarship fund—several years ahead of schedule. Nissen, who teaches and directs the Reclaiming Futures program in the Graduate School of Social Work, wants to support graduate students who plan careers helping youth to overcome substance abuse.

“When I first decided to start a scholarship fund at Portland State,” she says, “I thought I’d have to build it slowly, say in $500 a year increments, for years and years.” Then she learned about the Miller Foundation’s scholarship challenge grant for first-time donors. “I thought it was too good to be true. I decided to reverse my plan and figure out some way to front-load the scholarship endowment now, so that it can grow in the months and years ahead. The chance to double your money overnight is an incredibly strong motivator.”

Nissen’s $12,500 gift, combined with the challenge grant’s match, creates a fund that meets the required $20,000 minimum to open an endowment through the PSU Foundation. “I’m very grateful to the Miller Foundation,” she says.

Raised and educated in Colorado, Nissen began her academic career at Metropolitan State College of Denver, specializing in problems related to addictive behaviors. In 2000 she moved west to Portland State to direct the headquarters of Reclaiming Futures, a five-year, $21 million initiative funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The project aims to reinvent juvenile justice system methods of intervening with youth who get into trouble with drugs, alcohol, and crime. Pilot programs in 10 U.S. locations are testing new treatment models that integrate the involvement of courts, police, detention facilities, businesses, schools, and families in a network of support.

Reclaiming Futures employs a strengths-based philosophy, Nissen explains. “That is to say, instead of looking at a teen’s problems or risks and trying to fix what’s broken, you look for what is working and build that up.”

According to the project’s Web site, allowing just one youth to leave high school for a life of crime and drug abuse costs society up to $2.3 million. Nissen and her colleagues hope that their work will help find new approaches to breaking this tragic and expensive cycle.

Nissen’s passion for positive change shaped the new Youth Strengths in Action Scholarship, which her gift is creating. She is particularly interested in assisting social work master’s degree students who have creative ideas about working with youth from a strengths-based perspective.

“There’s no upper limit on what a young person can become,” she says with obvious conviction, “if someone believes in them.”

She knows this from personal experience. “I’ve been so lucky. I’ve been on the receiving end of so much help throughout my education and the early stages of my career—many people invested in me. It’s really fulfilling to be able to pay some of that forward now.”

New Donors Meet the Challenge

The Miller Challenge will match a total of $225,000 in scholarship gifts from first-time Portland State donors, resulting in an additional $500,000 toward the University's goal. What gifts qualify?

• gifts from new donors
• gifts up to $20,000
• gifts for current use or to build permanent endowments
• gifts for any area of study or designated to a specific school, department, or program
• gifts for undergraduate or graduate students

For more information about supporting Portland State University students, visit www.pdx.edu/giving or phone 503-725-4PSU. To make a gift online go to www.foundation.pdx.edu/publicgift/. All gifts are processed by the PSU Foundation.