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Campaign Update: $39 million and counting
Less than a year into its five-year public phase, Campaign UMass is nearly a third of the way to its $125 million goal. That $39 million had been raised by May 1 is music to the ears of Dr. Norma Jean Anderson, one of a forty-member cabinet of distinguished volunteers determined to see the campaign succeed.
"From the first meeting I attended, I thought we had a winner in this campaign," said Anderson in an interview in her Shutesbury home this Cabinet membership isn't just honorary; it means rallying the troops. For Anderson, whose twenty-four years with the School of Education included sixteen as associate dean, it means working directly with School of Ed development officer Arnette Nelson to identify, contact, and encourage support from alumni and friends.
Like everybody else on the Campaign UMass cabinet, Anderson
has other things to do. Just living in her house a fabulous wooden
castle of a place that she built in 1990 and to which she's still adding
could keep the emeritus professor of education happily engaged full-time.
One of the things she has there, besides a sauna, hot tubs, sunroom, music
room, and space for a whole lot of guests, is a tidy little downstairs
office with floor-to-ceiling shelves of Mary Kay products. The network
of consultants she directs for the Dallas cosmetics giant is a kind of
mini-lab for the organizational development expertise for which she's also
in demand as a consultant to organizations and corporations all
over the country, and indeed the world. "You know, you can
teach this stuff, but can you do it?" she laughs.
It's pretty obvious that Anderson can do both. On the wall of a larger
upstairs office is a handsomely framed photo-montage of all the families
of all the participants in a leadership training group she taught in California
a few years ago. The group was so in love with her that they flew out en
masse to spend a week with her a year later. The nature of her work
and personality are such that her extended family just keeps growing; she's
had over 300 house guests since moving into her Shutesbury home.
She's very much involved with her immediate family, too, and with the charismatic congregation of Hope Community Church in Amherst, which she co-founded with her late husband LaVerne Anderson, Sr. '72G, 73G, and where her son Carlos is pastor and daughters Crystal Calloway and Rhonda Gordon '74 are associate pastor and minister of music, respectively. LaVerne Anderson, Jr. '76 died in 1989, a year after his father.
In short, the woman has plenty on her plate. She agreed to add Campaign UMass because she sees the opportunity for a great leap forward in the work she help-ed pioneer in the School of Education in the '70s. "I'd like to leave this earth leaving something behind," she said this spring. "Now, I don't intend to leave for quite some time! But when I do, I want to have made this statement with my life: That giving and receiving are one."
Recent Major Gifts
$1
million cash gift from Jack Flavin '59 to set up a chair in entrepreneurship
in the SOM
$2
million trust from Richard J. '55 and Barbara Barnett '55 Mahoney,
in addition to a major annual gift to the chemistry department
$710,000
estate gift from Doris Little
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Friend of UMass and lover of horses Angie Lederle, at the campus stable in the 1960s. |
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