Written By: Kimberly Leung, Student Endowment Fund Committee Chair

Five hundred thousand dollars. Half a million dollars. $500,000. No matter how your phrase it, the Richard T. Romer Student Endowment Fund’s goal is a large dollar amount with a lot of zeroes trailing behind it. This may have been a lofty and aggressive goal to some, but to think that this is about to become a reality!

Today’s transportation students are a new generation of engineers and planners not solely focused on the highways of yesteryears but are constantly pushing the boundaries with how we design our transportation systems and infrastructure. So many innovative ideas are coming out of the classroom, and we need to give our students a voice in professional societies like ITE to express these ideas. At one of my early internships, my supervisor told me that if I walk into a meeting and if there is a seat at the table, I was supposed to sit at the table. It did not matter that I was an intern. By supporting the Student Endowment Fund, we are quite literally inviting these students to the table by financially providing them with the means to share their work and perspectives at ITE. After all, these students will be the ones painting our streets with red transit lanes and green bike lanes; planning for a world with autonomous cars and self-driving vehicles; and completely revamping the transportation world. Why would we not want to encourage their presence in ITE?

The young professionals who you see active within ITE today have most likely received support from the Student Endowment Fund one way or another, whether it be through their student chapters or directly from the District. I know I have. When the Student Endowment Fund was founded in 2004, I was just a high school student who had a vague notion about what she wanted for a career. Fast forward five years and I was unknowingly reaping the benefits of the Student Endowment Fund when the James H. Kell Student Award helped to reinvigorate an entire student chapter at UC Berkeley and to bring my classmates and me to our first Annual Meeting in Denver.

Each year, over $15,000 is spent on the Western District’s Student Initiatives, which are paid for directly from the Student Endowment Fund. These Student Initiatives include:

• Funding travel to District Annual Meetings through student competitions, papers, and awards; the James H. Kell Student RFP; and the Data Collection Fund
• Subsidizing costs for the annual Student Leadership Summit, which held its inaugural event in 2014
• Sponsoring special events for students and professionals

Earlier this Spring, Western District President Cathy Leong reached out to all Section and Chapter Presidents to kick off the “Close the Gap” campaign. The Western District leaders issued a challenge to each of the Section and Chapter Presidents to match their annual contribution to help close the gap in the Endowment Fund. In turn, a number of Presidents kicked off campaigns at the local level to challenge their members to aid in this effort. As of mid-May, nearly $15,000 has been raised by the “Close the Gap” campaign through the support of our leaders and members at the District, Section, and Chapter levels, putting us less than $50,000 from the ultimate fundraising goal.

We have less than two months before we all meet in Albuquerque for this year’s Annual Meeting, and we have 4,000 members in the Western District. What if we all just forewent our daily lattes from the local café next week and put that $20 into the Endowment Fund instead? That will do the trick. So then what happens when we reach the $500,000? Yes, the Endowment Fund would be self-sustaining and could generate enough annual revenue to support the current Student Initiatives, but do we stop fundraising? Of course not! That is when we go back to our list of Student Initiatives and determine what we want to include and expand next. The Student Endowment Fund Committee likes to dream big (if you could not tell already from the start of this article).

Contributions to the Endowment Fund can be made at westernite.org/endowment-fund/endowment-fund-contribute/