Changing the World (November - December 2013)

what your investment in ut makes possible

SLAM DUNK! How one couple helps Longhorns like Brianna Taylor, Class of ’17, excel on the court and in life

nov/dec 2013

Dr. John Goodenough holds a lithium-ion battery in his lab on the UT campus.

WORLD

MY UT. MY LEGACY.

TAKE A QUICK LOOK AROUND. a donor to the University, giving outright gifts and establishing future gifts You’re probably within arm’s length to support a high-pressure lab at the of a John Goodenough invention.

Goodenough, a mechanical engineering Texas Materials Institute. The future gifts provide him income during his professor in UT’s Cockrell School of Engineering, helped launch the wireless lifetime and will support the lab after his passing. revolution with his development of the “When the faculty give, it shows that rechargeable lithium-ion battery, which they believe in the institution,” he said. powers our mobile phones, laptop “I wanted to set an example.” computers, iPods, and other portable You can build your own legacy at UT. electronic devices.

Contact our Gift and Estate Planning Goodenough, who turns 90 this team to find out how you can provide summer, still teaches and still invents. for your family and still support the He’s still dedicated to finding new ways University you love. to store energy, with an eye toward the U.S. achieving energy independence.

To learn more: Honored in 2011 as a UT Austin giving.utexas.edu/giftplanning Inventor of the Year, Goodenough has found that his inventions aren’t the only 866-488-3927 giftplan@www.utexas.edu way he can change the world. He’s also

CHANGING THE WORLD What your investment in UT makes possible

CONTENTS HOME COURT ADVANTAGE Austin’s Julia Hickman and Cecil Reynolds are super-fans when it comes to helping student-athletes achieve success

A CLASS ACT The LBJ School’s Class of ’82 comes together to provide new opportunities for students following in their footsteps

Cover: Freshman Brianna Taylor of Houston plays

guard for Texas women’s basketball. Julia Hickman and Cecil Reynolds have endowed a graduate fellowship to help student-athletes such as Taylor pursue advanced degrees at UT once their playing days are behind them.

CREDIT: UT Athletics

Above: Julia Hickman, center, flashing her trademark

double Horns Up at UT’s Frank Erwin Center, has been a fixture at women’s basketball games along with her husband, Cecil Reynolds, for many years. The couple cheers on the Longhorns at many away games as well.

CREDIT: UT Athletics

SMALL GIFTS, BIG JOY Meet five faithful donors who find great satisfaction in giving year in and year out to the University reprinted from nov/dec 2013

CHANGING THE WORLD What your investment in UT makes possible

HOME COURT ADVANTAGE A basketball-loving couple helps female student-athletes achieve success off the court.

F Above: The Longhorns

huddle before taking on Kansas State at the Big 12 tournament in March.

Opposite: Julia Hickman

and Cecil Reynolds at the Erwin Center, where they are familiar faces to players, coaches, and fans.

CREDITS: From left: UT Athlet-

ics; courtesy Cecil Reynolds

58 |The

or

T exas W omen ’ s B asketball super - fans J ulia H ickman and C ecil

Reynolds, the players and coaches they cheer for and the fellow fans they sit with at the Frank Erwin Center each winter are more than a community. The couple calls them “our basketball family.”

Hickman and Reynolds, while not UT graduates, are hooked on the Lady Longhorns. They attend nearly every home game, go to practices, even travel with the team to some of the away games. They’ve cheered on the Horns at tournaments in Canada, the Caribbean, and Europe.

And this year they took their support a step further, creating a first-of-its-kind graduate fellowship to help players find success after basketball.

It all started with camp. Julia explains that when she was a UT professor in the early 1990s, then-coach Jody Conradt started hosting bas-

ketball camps for Longhorn fans. The first camp drew about 75 women, and she went with some friends.

“We went to Hunt, Texas, and stayed at Camp Waldemar for a whole weekend. We ate with the team, and they taught us how to play. Well, I’ve always been into sports, I always wanted to play everything, and at that first camp, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”

Cecil soon caught the bug as well. “Women’s basketball is a lot of fun to watch,” he says. “You see a lot more of a game of strategy and team-

work as opposed to a game of individual power that you see in the men’s game.”

Julia and Cecil are psychologists, and Julia does a little scream therapy of her own at the games.

In those early years, when she was still a full-time clinical psychologist, “I had to sit all day and be calm and listen to my patients,” she says.

“But at the games, people would not describe me as calm and patient,” she adds, laughing.

“Everyone knows this about me — that it gives me a release.”

“A few years ago,” a proud Cecil says, “she was the NCAA women’s basketball tournament Fan of the Week on their website. They had a picture of her standing up, both arms in the air, screaming at the top of her lungs at—” “At somebody,” Julia says.

“It had to be the referee,” Cecil says.

SUPPORT IN A CRIS IS

After the couple, longtime Bastrop residents, lost their house and nearly all their possessions in the 2011 wildfire, their basketball family stepped in. “They were there, checking on us and doing things for us,” Cecil says.

UT staffers surprised them one day by dropping in at their relocated home base in Austin with a his-and-hers assortment of burnt orange attire. “Basketball season was coming up,” says Julia, “and we had to have Longhorn clothes! Their support for us when we were in a crisis just meant so much.”

Cecil is now a professor emeritus after many years of teaching at Texas A&M. He and Julia are into sports of all kinds—Cecil played professional baseball before entering academia—and when they found themselves working for institutions with a long rivalry, they had a problem to solve.

“We said, let’s compromise,” Julia recalls. “We began to do women’s athletics at Texas, primarily basketball, and men’s, primarily football, at A&M. It’s worked out well, and we’ve bonded with our Longhorn family.

We sit by the same people we have for years, and every August we throw a big fan party. We call it the Basketball Bash.”

Longtime fans, whether or not they know the couple personally, might recognize Julia as the lady who waves the Believe sign at games. Each year she makes a new one and has people sign it, starting at the Bash and then at the first few games. Afterward she has it laminated, because it’s destined to go to every game she does that season—and then some.

“If there’s an out-of-town game that we’re not attending, we find somebody who’s going,” Cecil says. “The sign goes to all the games.”

Why a Believe sign? “It was very important to me that the players and coaches knew we believed in them,” says Julia. “They know we’re always on their side. Winning or losing, we’re gonna be there for them.”

‘A WOND E RFU L S EED’

The Julia Hickman and Cecil Reynolds Team Spirit Fellowship will be awarded to student-athletes who have exhausted their NCAA eligibility and are committed to pursuing a graduate degree at UT. While recipients must be admitted to a graduate or doctoral program on their

own merits, preference for the fellowship will be given to women’s basketball team members.

If no such candidate is available in a given year, then individuals who participated on another UT women’s athletics team may be chosen.

“We came to realize, talking to the coaches and athletic directors,” Cecil says, “that, particularly with the basketball program, they don’t really need scholarships at the undergraduate level.

They’ve got that handled. But they have other needs. This is a way we can help where there is very little support currently.”

“Both of us, having taught doctoral students for so long, really value education, and we value graduate education for people who want that,” Julia says.

UT women’s athletics director Christine Plonsky says that while some graduate fellowships exist in college athletics—the Big 12 Conference awards one to a male and female athlete each year at each Big 12 institution, for instance—they represent a relatively rare opportunity for students who want to go further in their studies.

“This is a wonderful seed, this gift, because of the people that it will help,” Plonsky says. “But more than that, it makes a statement about who we are and what we are in UT Athletics, and why people like Julia and Cecil became fans. They didn’t just become fans, they became advocates, they became believers.”

“We care about these young women, and we want to see them be successful,” Cecil says. “Our hope is that down the line, they might come back and add to this fellowship or establish one of their own.

“Wherever they end up, whether it’s in business, medicine, law, what have you, if they become successful and have the resources to do so, the greatest compliment for us, I think, would be for them to pay it forward and help somebody else.”

ENDOWING THE FUTURE

W

ith an endowed gift, alumni and friends can provide a predictable, steady source of funding over time for something they believe in at UT. The principal of their gift is invested, never spent, and distributions are made to their chosen program or area.

Graduate fellowships can be funded for $50,000 or more. In creating theirs for student-athletes, Julia and Cecil are making a blended gift—they’re giving outright during their lifetimes and have a planned gift in place for after they’re gone—to eventually bring the endowment principal up to $1 million.

“Rather than wait, we wanted to be able to see some of the fruits of it,” Cecil says. “We’re funding it up front, and our intent is to add to it every year. And then we’ll leave a much larger chunk of funding when we pass.”

Learn more about ways to support the University at giving.utexas.edu/how-to-give.

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CHANGING THE WORLD What your investment in UT makes possible

A CLASS ACT

The LBJ School’s tight-knit Class of ’82 comes together to provide new opportunities for students following in their footsteps.

H

e clearly remembers driving with trepidation the long road

from the mountains of New Mexico to the rolling hills of Austin to start his first semester at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. In 1980, Doug Brookman had been out of school for a few

years and had reservations about graduate school and whether this program was the right fit. For Brookman, as for many students, returning to school was a gamble.

Above: Members of the

LBJ School Class of ’82 have teamed up to endow a fellowship and internship for students at their alma mater.

CREDITS: From left: LBJ

School; courtesy Ryan Oliver

60 |The

Thirty-one years later, Brookman, MPA ’82, is president of Public Solutions, Inc., in Washington, D.C., and says his decision was nothing less than life changing.

“I feel like we’re huge beneficiaries of all that LBJ offered us—the learning experience, the congeniality and friends, the financial support, the boost that our careers got right at the outset,” he says of himself and his classmates.

Brookman’s story is one of many that have surfaced in the past year among the Class of 1982. At their 30-year reunion in 2012, members of the class discovered that current students were not being awarded the same financial sup-

port they had received. In fact, the school is now able to offer financial aid to just slightly more than one-third of each incoming class. They decided to do something to help.

The Class of ’82 mobilized and challenged one another to raise $150,000 to award a oneyear tuition fellowship and internship stipend each year to a deserving LBJ School student.

Understanding that not every graduate of the class was in a position to donate a large amount, they encouraged their classmates to choose a meaningful contribution over a fiveyear period. This allowed alumni to pledge at a level they were comfortable with and pool their

WHY I GIVE donations together into an achievable So far in the end goal.

The class has Campaign for Texas, exceeded its goal by 20 percent so far. As of Nov. 1, 65 percent of members have benefited from had contributed to create a $180,600 endowment. For a class that benefited from the tutelage of public policy greats such as U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordan and Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall, giving back on such a scale is a fitting new chapter in their story. support faculty I t ’s a s t o r y o f l o n g st a n d i n g members and their friendships puncturesearch ated with reunions every five years, annual hiking trips, and a special connectivity that serves as a reminder of why they came to the LBJ School in the first place—to change the world for the public good. Now they can do it one new student at a time.

“Let me tell you a story about why this fellowship matters,” says Blaine Bull, MPA ’82, managing partner of Austin-based Vianovo. “During a client meeting I was introduced to a very impressive young woman who more than held her own at a fairly contentious meeting in a room full of egos. While visiting with her I discovered she had recently graduated from the LBJ School. She told me she had been lucky enough to receive a full fellowship. She went on to share that the fellowship offer was the deciding factor in her decision to attend the school, and what a life-changing experience she had there.”

Taking inspiration from when the school was able to supply most students with generous levels of fellowship support, the Class of ’82 is keeping its eye on the future, working to ensure that future generations don’t miss out on the benefits of graduating with little or no debt. The members aren’t satisfied with just their endowment and now challenge all LBJ School classes to come together to create their own.

“Public policy is a fun, dynamic, interesting career and a noble pursuit,” says Karen Neuwald, MPA ’82. “The challenge for future classes is how we can overcome the current cynical attitude toward public service. Being able to offer assistance at a high level will recruit better students and show them that they have a choice in their degree. If we can offer better financial support to students, we can continue to enhance the stature of this degree.”

3,700 students 698 new

scholarships and fellowships

111 new

endowments

SMALL GIFTS, BIG JOY

A

re you unsure whether your support for UT in the final year of the Campaign for Texas will make a difference? Don’t be.

Donations need not be big to have a big impact—particularly when it comes to benefiting students.

A third of the more than 200,000 alumni and friends who have given to UT during the campaign have made at least one gift of $25 or less. Such smaller gifts have played a remarkably large role, helping put the total amount raised at $2.3 billion as of Nov. 1 and bringing the $3 billion goal within reach.

While their contributions may not have a lot of zeros in them, these five perennial donors are among the many who find satisfaction in giving to the University.

“I feel like that’s just doing your part as an alumnus,” says Ryan Oliver, MBA ’06, a brand strategist for Twitter in Atlanta.

“You don’t have to get your name on a building, but giving something back is really important.”

Sam Woollard, BSW ’88, of Austin, gives a modest amount each year to her alma mater, the School of Social Work, confident that it will be put to good use.

“I give because I believe in the mission of the school,” she says.

And they know they’re making a difference regardless of the size of their

“You don’t have to get your name on a building.”

– Ryan Oliver

gifts. “If 1,000 people give $50, that’s $50,000,” says Houston attorney Steve Bryant, MA ’97, JD ’00. “It all adds up.”

People also like seeing their support grow cumulatively over time. “It’s like donating to your 401(k),” says Kyle McAdams, BAr ’86, of Great Falls, Va. Giving regularly is the important thing, says Linda Avila, PhD ’86, a retired professor of educational administration who lives in the small South Texas town of Sandia, because “costs keep going up every year, and state support keeps going down.”

850,000 $50 $100 gifts of less than $1,000 since the campaign began

covers a registration fee at the Texas Nursing Students Association annual conference

builds an architecture student’s final semester model

Changing the World is produced by the University Development Office. Please send your feedback and suggestions to editor Jamey Smith at jjsmith@austin.utexas.edu.

For more news and information about giving to UT, visit giving.utexas.edu.

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