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"With eyes of faith, consider the greatness of your mission and the wonderful amount of good that you can accomplish."

Father Basil Moreau, C.S.C .

Growing the endowment, funding program initiatives, and improving the physical campus are the primary goals of the Legacy of Excellence Campaign. The total for the seven goals described in the following sections is $30 million .

Legacy of Excellence Campaign Goal I
Endowment for Scholarship Assistance

• Targeted Goal: $5.5 million

Increasing the endowment for student financial assistance is a priority of this campaign. A principle of the College's mission directs that King's will "assist talented students of modest financial means to attend." The vast majority of King's students come from working-class families, and as many as forty percent of current King's College students represent the first generation of their families to attend college. King's provides financial aid to more than ninety percent of its students in any given year. To realize the dream of a college education, scholarship assistance is essential for these students and for their families.

Legacy of Excellence Campaign Goal II
Campus Improvements

• Targeted Goal: $7.5 million

Improving the campus to enhance the quality of daily life for the King's community is crucial to this campaign plan. In advance of a formal capital campaign, Father O'Hara and the board of directors authorized three projects to address immediate campus needs: the renovation and expansion of the Sheehy Student Center (now the Sheehy-Farmer Campus Center); the acquisition and complete renovation of the nearby Margarida Apartments (now Alumni Hall); and the acquisition of a portion of North Franklin Street for the creation of a pedestrian mall in the center of campus (now called Monarch Court). These enhancements have not only made the campus more comfortable, safe and attractive to students and staff, but have also beautified and revitalized the King's section of downtown Wilkes-Barre.

The Legacy of Excellence Campaign will enable the College to fund fully these improvements, which were made in anticipation of a capital initiative.

Sheehy-Farmer Campus Center
The recently renovated Campus Center , with its beautiful outside courtyard and waterfall and its banquet/conference facility, is the hub of the campus, providing social, recreational and meeting space for students, faculty, and staff. The Center has positively affected College admissions and attracts numerous community groups to campus.

Alumni Hall
By constructing attractive, apartment-style housing, which provides a safe, highly suitable academic and personal environment for students, the College has reintegrated 22 percent of off-campus residents into the campus community. Alumni Hall will continue to influence the application, admission and retention of qualified students, and will contribute to the College's fiscal stability.

Monarch Court
The creation of a beautifully landscaped pedestrian mall along a former stretch of North Franklin Street unifies the campus, allows for safe passage between buildings, and provides a park-like oasis for students, faculty, staff and community. It also favorably positions King's in the forefront of Wilkes-Barre's plans for riverfront development and the revitalization of downtown.

Legacy of Excellence Campaign Goal III
Academic Growth and Faculty Development

• Targeted Goal: $4 million

The third goal of the campaign plan focuses on securing programmatic resources and increasing endowment to ensure the future of three specific academic programs and to provide funds for faculty development.

Technology Education
The importance of computer proficiency in today's world is unquestioned. Additional funds will enable the College to train faculty and staff to use these technologies more effectively and to integrate their use into the curriculum. All students, in computer studies and across the disciplines, will benefit from the achievement of this goal.

Science Programs
To keep pace with advances in biology, physics, environmental science, chemistry and related sciences; to offer students and their professors real-life research experiences; and to prepare graduates for future careers, the College must provide students and faculty with modern laboratories and state-of-the-art equipment. Given the speed with which technology changes, the College must meet the challenge of constantly acquiring and replacing equipment.

Advancement of The McGowan School of Business
The College celebrates full AACSB accreditation, which recognizes the accomplishments of the McGowan School of Business. With that goal achieved, the College now moves forward with a renewed commitment to monitoring national and international trends in business education, and to reevaluating its own curriculum in light of the ever-accelerating pace of change in the world of commerce and finance. To expose students to the latest in scholarship and best business practices, the College seeks to increase endowment and other funds that will help attract visiting scholars and business leaders for seminars, workshops and lectures, and to offer additional professional training for faculty.

Legacy of Excellence Campaign Goal IV
Strengthening the College's Liberal Arts Tradition

• Targeted Goal: $4 million

The rich tradition of the liberal arts curriculum thrives at King's. The College has a faculty of uncommon distinction, dedicated to teaching and committed to student mentoring. Time and again, our graduates tell us that their grounding in the liberal arts and the commitment of the King's faculty have helped them to succeed in their careers and in their personal lives.

The College's objective, over time, is to sustain that emphasis and to provide the nurturing environment in which the liberal arts can flourish. To accomplish this, a variety of curricular and co-curricular projects are necessary to benefit students and faculty.

The College must assist faculty, first, to develop innovative courses that cross traditional disciplinary lines, and, second, to weave a cross-disciplinary ethics component into the curriculum. Accomplishing these goals will mean expanding the Center for Ethics and Public Life to serve as a place for curricular and professional development, for community outreach to first-generation students and their families, and for research, evaluation and publication of best practices in ethics and moral development.

To expand the horizons of students and faculty, the College will invite to campus scholars and other distinguished professionals to give lectures, participate in symposia, and teach courses. Such programs will enable King's to attract individuals from a variety of national, ethnic and cultural backgrounds, thereby affording the student body a direct and positive encounter with the world beyond the College.

Liberal arts endowment and operating funds will support programs such as ethnic studies, artists-in-residence, visiting writers, and a language institute. On the well-founded educational theory that scholars engaged at the frontiers of their fields make exciting and effective teachers, the College will also foster faculty/student research interests.

Legacy of Excellence Campaign Goal V
The Shoval Center for Community Engagement and Learning

• Targeted Goal: $1.5 million

Liberal education in the twenty-first century demands student engagement in the habits of service and citizenship, and a commitment among institutions of higher education to the community beyond campus borders. The Shoval Center for Community Engagement and Learning at King's will serve as a clearinghouse to coordinate diverse campus-wide initiatives, to integrate Catholic social tradition with the College's three-pillared mission of teaching, research and service, and to provide student learning opportunities outside the traditional college curriculum. Three dynamic approaches exemplify the means to achieve these goals.

Volunteer Community Service. Through programs such as CitySERVE, a teaching and learning experience, King's offers its first-year students the opportunity to volunteer with community non-profit agencies such as the McGlynn Learning Center , Project Head Start, and the Catholic Youth Center . Students serve as tutors, mentors, role models and friends to at-risk children. In addition, King's faculty, staff and students have created an outreach program for the City's newest and, often, its most vulnerable citizens, those in the Hispanic community. Following the initial experience, many students continue to volunteer through King's SERVE programs, which engage students locally, nationally and abroad in social service projects in schools, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and at Habitat for Humanity building sites, to name just a few.

Academically-Based Service or "Service Learning." Increasingly, faculty use the community as a classroom to strengthen students' critical reflection, to refine their research skills, and to encourage a sense of responsibility in a world of social, economic and environmental disparities. Real world experiences help to integrate theory and practice. King's students have learned new strategies to boost the chances of educational success among low-income children, have been involved in a hands-on project to protect the local watershed by restoring eroding creek beds to their natural channels, and have evaluated the effectiveness of programs in the local juvenile justice system. These projects provide our students with learning and character-building experiences.

Intellectual Expertise. Through faculty/student interactive research projects, King's provides services, skills and knowledge to respond to community issues and opportunities. The College's Public Policy and Social Research Institute's Juvenile Research Project is one example. Another is its Susquehanna River Institute, which promotes environmental stewardship and affords King's students the opportunity to assist corporate partners, such as PPL, Inc., to solve real-world challenges.

Legacy of Excellence Goal VI
Intercollegiate Athletics and Student Recreation

• Targeted Goal: $1 million

The College has enjoyed a remarkable record in its athletic programs, both intercollegiate and intramural. The varsity teams are consistently at the top of their conferences, and King's student-athletes have been awarded numerous "All-American," "All-Conference," and NCAA awards and titles.

A well-run athletic program requires skilled coaches and student-athletes who can balance academic obligations with a competitive commitment to sport.

King's owes its students the best facilities possible so that decisive play in any game will be determined by skill, not by the conditions of the field, court or floor. It is also desirable for the College to attract academically talented students who will represent King's competitively at the intercollegiate level. Accordingly, King's will expand and renovate athletic facilities, especially Betzler Fields, to assure full opportunity for every student who wishes to participate in varsity or intramural competition, sports clubs, personal recreation and wellness activities.

Important objectives for this goal will be to add new lights and artificial turf to the stadium at Betzler Fields.

Legacy of Excellence Campaign Goal VII
The Annual Fund

• Targeted Goal: $6.5 million, 2003-2008

Each year, numerous alumni, friends, corporations and foundations contribute invaluable financial assistance to the Annual Fund. This support, which totaled more than $1.5 million in fiscal year 2005, is an integral part of the College's annual operating budget. Currently, over ninety percent of King's students receive financial aid. Clearly, tuition and fees do not cover the full cost of a King's College education. Both restricted and unrestricted annual funds provide significant financial resources that help to reduce the gap between cost and tuition. Annual funds provide a margin of excellence that allows King's to retain and attract strong faculty, to enroll talented but financially challenged students, and to enhance campus life.

As the capital campaign proceeds, the College must sustain and increase current levels of support for the Annual Fund. A major goal of the capital campaign will be to help donors understand the continuing importance of the Annual Fund, as well as the important goals of the Legacy of Excellence Campaign.