Strength in Numbers

Strength in Numbers On Giving Day 2020, the Rollins community came together to show the world the extraordinary difference a day makes.

On February 20, more than 2,000 members of the Rollins community seized a moment in time. Your gifts on Giving Day 2020 made a difference that will last far longer than 24 hours and extend far beyond the confines of America’s most beautiful campus. One donor gave on the phone in between meetings. Another hand-delivered an ear-marked check weeks in advance. Collectively, Giving Day donors made a resounding statement: We are brighter together.

For one day, we celebrated everything that makes Rollins the best liberal arts college in the South—from academic and athletic excellence to unmatched opportunities for hands-on learning. A record-breaking 2,047 Rollins alumni, students, parents, faculty, staff, and friends came together to raise nearly $280,000 for our students.

Gifts to The Rollins Annual Fund open doors to transformative opportunities for our students on campus, in our backyard, and around the world. Whether supporting financial aid and scholarships or study abroad and community engagement, your gifts allow our students to gain the 21st-century skills, experiences, and relationships that prepare them to lead meaningful lives and productive careers.

Your generosity unveils the promise that Rollins students represent—the promise of a brighter tomorrow. There are countless stories to tell of how your gifts—both on Giving Day and yearround—are impacting our students and helping us deliver on our mission to create the next generation of global citizens and responsible leaders. Here are a few of our favorites.

Thanks to you, Jakobi Bonner ’20 ’21MBA has the opportunity to shine on the court and in the classroom.

In 2019, Bonner was selected to attend the prestigious NCAA StudentAthlete Leadership Forum, where he further honed the leadership and communication skills he’s been learning at Rollins on his way to pursuing a career in athletics administration.

Thanks to you, Army veteran Andrew Boyd ’21 was able to

re-enter civilian life with meaning and purpose. Alongside his classes in the Hamilton Holt School, Boyd interned at a local nonprofit to help optimize supply chain operations, enabling him to sharpen skills in task management and system analysis that will give him a competitive advantage when applying to grad programs in applied intelligence.

Thanks to you, more than 70 percent of students study

abroad. Gifts to The Rollins Annual Fund provide study abroad experiences and international field studies that form the foundation for students like Mikayla Panariello ’21 to discover their passions. Panariello trekked high up into the Monteverde Cloud Forest on the First-Year Field Study to Costa Rica to study sustainability right at the source before ever stepping foot on campus.

Thanks to you, Marissa Cobuzio ’19 is turning her passion

for animals and people into a meaningful career. At Rollins, Cobuzio worked to educate her peers about the importance of working dogs. She put her volunteer experience in AdventHealth’s pet therapy program into practice, getting Rollins approved as a campus for raising service dogs. Now, the biology and sociology double major is at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine and plans to specialize in animal reproduction and service-dog breeding.

Thanks to you, students like Cristina Toppin ’21 have the

opportunity to make academic history at Rollins. The double major in political science and religious studies became the first Tar to attend the Harvard Kennedy School’s Public Policy Leadership Conference, an experience that solidified her plans to pursue a graduate degree in public policy to confront issues of gender-based violence and women’s rights.

Thanks to you, Rollins is the No. 1 regional university in

the South. Alumni participation is a critical component of college rankings like U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings of the nation’s best colleges, which are measured on criteria like academic quality, first-year retention, and strength of the faculty. As a result, your gifts on Giving Day and throughout the year not only support current and future Tars, but they also enhance the prestige of your Rollins degree.