Florida Tomorrow University of Florida\'s

Florida Tomorrow

University of Florida's Florida Tomorrow Campaign

Channels Education into Local and Global Action

Donors to the University of Florida now have unique opportunity to help meet important goals within the broader community. When a wealthy Jacksonville couple named Troy and Julianne Davis reflected on their experience as former students at University of Florida, they saw an opportunity to make a true difference. They created an endowment to help support a camp for children suffering from dyslexia, channeling their money through their alma mater and its new program. Florida Tomorrow, the program which has been highly touted by the University, creates a context where people like the Davis family, students at the school, and the broader community, can see their ambitions come to life through education, energy and action.

Students at the University of Florida have the opportunity to invest their education and degree work into the improvement of the world around them. According to its mission, the University is now orienting the array of its departments and administrative faculties toward the joint pursuit of educational advancement and involvement with the community beyond the classroom. The University's website denotes that "Florida Tomorrow is the University of Florida's comprehensive campaign to raise $1.5 billion - a campaign that will impact every corner of the university and extend to every corner of the earth." (UF, 1)

This ambitious statement is underlain by the program's design, which professes to engage such disciplines as medicine, the arts and technology as a means to both direct student course and degree work toward broader applications such as the combating of world disease, the improvement of endowments for creative expression and the disruption of global climate change and to continually stimulate community, campus and alumni involvement in the stimulation of funds.

Participation in this program, the University notes, is intended to be universal, helping to bridge the gap between student and public lives. The intents of the program are manifold, not the least of which is to help students to better realize the impact which they can have on the improvement of the global community through the application and extension of the education which they will receive at the University. Perhaps more importantly though is the chance to see a real and tangible outcome from one's efforts, whether this is manifested in an athletic booster club's donation of sports equipment to a local high school in need or in the construction of a technology sophisticated library facility for a Florida community, or even the collective of departmental efforts to instruct a contraception program in the developing sphere where HIV / AIDS is rampant.

In all of these applications, the University has proudly recommended itself as a context where the future community and world leaders in the improvement and progress of current conditions are able to place their skills into real practice. In addition, for those attached to the campus or attached to the members of its community, Florida Tomorrow, is a clear way to express interest in a wide array of socially constructive outlets for donation.