Duke Counts Historic Fundraising and Alumni Engagement Year as it Reflects on 100 Years of Impact 

As Duke University continues to mark its centennial year throughout 2024, it is celebrating historic fundraising and alumni engagement efforts.  

Nearly 87,000 Duke University alumni and friends gave $573 million in fiscal year 2024 to support the research, faculty, financial aid, patient care, campus transformations, and the student experience that will take the university into its next 100 years. In addition, more 17,000 alumni gave their time back to Duke through volunteer efforts for the university, including serving as alumni ambassadors to prospective students, paying it forward by giving career advice and more.  

“I am incredibly grateful for the remarkable generosity of Duke’s alumni and friends around the globe,” said Duke University President Vincent E. Price. “As we look ahead to the great promise of our second century, their philanthropic support will power Duke’s excellence in advancing scholarship, educating tomorrow’s leaders and changemakers, and providing exceptional patient care.” 

Gifts and non-governmental grants for research totaled $223 million, representing the largest funded area of private philanthropy. Donors also supported financial aid for undergraduate and graduate students ($130 million), faculty research and teaching ($29 million), and new construction and facility renovations ($9 million). 

“The generosity of our Duke alumni and friends keeps this great university going—and this is more important than ever as we take on our most ambitious goals yet,” said David L. Kennedy, vice president for alumni engagement and development. “I am so thankful for all our alumni and friends do to support Duke through their time, talent and financial gifts. They make a difference for Duke every day.”  

The Duke Annual Fund received $48 million from 45,000 alumni, parents, students, and friends—a new dollar record. The Annual Fund helps support students and faculty, financial aid and fellowships, and educational programs for all of Duke’s undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. It also supports Duke Chapel, Duke Libraries, Duke Marine Lab, Nasher Museum of Art, and the Sarah P. Duke Gardens. 

See the impact of philanthropy at Duke in the 2024 Annual Impact Report. 

Highlights include: 

• Do you know how many Blue Devils there are in the world? Find out—and what they’ve been up to this year—on our By the Numbers engagement and philanthropy pages. 
• 17,000 volunteers gave back their time and talent through our dozens of programs—coming alongside local communities through Duke Alums Engage, giving advice to current students and more.  
• Volunteer alumni ambassadors paid it forward by interviewing 13,000 prospective students during the admissions cycle, as part of the Alumni Admissions Advisory Committee. 
• More than 1,800 alumni participated in Lifelong Learning programs, which put them back in the virtual classroom with Duke faculty. 
• 3,000 alumni came back to campus for Homecoming or Reunions weekends, the latter which is a significant driver for Annual Fund class gifts. Duke Trustee Mike Bingle B.S.E.’94 served as co-chair of his 30^th class reunion and helped lead the class of 1994 to an all-time record for Annual Fund dollars raised—$6.4 million.  
• Duke received its largest single award—$100 million from The Duke Endowment to support its most ambitious financial aid initiative to date. The award is providing full tuition grants for undergraduate students from North and South Carolina with total family incomes of less than $150,000, expanding fellowships for doctoral and professional school students across all schools, and supporting graduate and professional students who earned undergraduate degrees from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), among other priorities.  
• Duke continued to expand the Duke Climate Commitment, a new university-wide initiative focused on addressing climate change. Among the university’s goals are to facilitate a clean energy transition, create more climate resilient communities, leverage strengths in data to address climate problems, infuse climate fluency into the student curriculum, and more.  
• In a partnership among Duke Health, Durham Technical Community College, and Durham Public Schools, Bloomberg Philanthropies awarded Duke a transformative $29.5 million grant to establish an early college for high school students interested in pursuing health care careers upon graduation.  
• Duke Nursing School received its largest gift ever for faculty, students, and programs with an $8 million commitment by alumna Bettye Martin Musham to develop community-based educational programs, transform health care delivery, and reduce health inequities.  
• Duke campus buildings and grounds got a boost through several awards from The Duke Endowment, the Lilly Endowment and private donors. Among the highlights are: 
  • Updates to the Wilhelmina Reuben-Cooke Building to support collaborative and interdisciplinary learning, thanks to The Duke Endowment. The building houses Duke’s sociology and psychology departments and in 2021 was named in honor of Reuben-Cooke as one of the first five Black students who integrated Duke’s campus in 1963.  
  • A renovation of the historic Lilly Library on Duke’s East Campus, thanks to a $5 million award from the Lilly Endowment. When complete, Lilly will reflect a footprint that will be 75 percent larger, expanded study spaces, more technology-equipped project rooms, a writing studio, a 75-seat assembly space for public programs, a film screening room, and a café.  
  • The new Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Family Sculpture Garden thanks to a $5 million gift by Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger. The redesign will yield 270 degrees of walkable landscape for visitors, with accessible pathways and green spaces for community gatherings and events. The project also celebrates native plants and showcases art outdoors. 
  • A new “Garden Gateway” project at Sarah P. Duke Gardens thanks to a $2 million award from The Duke Endowment. The new award is the second from The Duke Endowment toward the overall $30 million project and will transform the visitor experience with a new welcome center, front entrance, and expanded spaces for events and programming. 
• Duke received a $30 million award from The Duke Endowment to elevate research in computing, artificial intelligence (A.I.) and machine learning via an historic faculty hiring initiative called Elevating Duke Computing. The effort will fund the hiring and start-up costs for one senior, luminary faculty member and four to seven mid-career faculty over the next five years.  
• Duke biomedical engineering professor Cameron McIntyre is pushing the boundaries of our brains with his research at the intersections of A.I. and deep brain stimulation. His work is providing hope for the treatment of movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease and is just one of the many contributions to Duke Science and Technology, the university’s highest effort to elevate the sciences that has raised $374 million to date. 

Universities and colleges report cash totals to the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) for its Voluntary Support of Education survey. This reflects actual cash received from private support, including outright gifts, grants and payments on existing pledges, and best represents fundraising activity from July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024.