Award Winner Presentations

Remarks from Rivi Frankle, Assistant Vice-President, Alumni and Stakeholder Relations, University of Toronto, recipient of the 2010 Manulife Financial Outstanding Achievement Award

First I want to thank CCAE and of course Manulife Financial for sponsoring the Manulife Financial Outstanding Achievement Award.  There are others to thank but I will leave that until the end of my remarks.
 
When I first learned I had received this honour, my first thought was to tell my friends and colleagues how overjoyed I was, but at the same time, to display at least some humility, and to say, like most award recipients, that I didn’t really deserve it.
 
After all, like so many people in the advancement field, I have spent my entire career, in the words of Jon Dellandrea, my former boss and previous winner of this award, “making heroes of others”, and putting donors, alumni, and volunteers into the spotlight.
 
Then I thought about it for a moment, and realized that in fact I do deserve this award. 
And although I am delighted for the recognition, and thrilled to accept this award, I am not accepting it for the reasons you may think.
 
Not because of my work at the University of Toronto. And not because of the success of the fundraising and alumni relations programs at my alma mater.  I deserve it based on the accomplishments of all of the people I have hired, and then mentored, over my career.  And some of these people are the reason I am here tonight.  They are the people who nominated me for this award.  And I want to thank them for thinking enough of me to do this.  But I will say more about them later.

Allow me for a moment to step back into a role I swore I would never assume, that of a veteran who speaks in the language of “I remember when.”
 
I want to go back for a moment to the eighties, when I was asked by the then President of the University to be the Volunteer Chair of the United Way campaign at the University of Toronto, while also doing my day job as Director of the University’s Career Centre.  It was through this effort over a 2 year period eventually resulting in the creation of a professional secretariat that I found I really enjoyed fund raising and working with volunteers.
 
All of the University’s fundraising at that time was a niche activity that involved a small staff, a handful of trustees, some volunteers, alumni, and the University President.
 
U of T’s previous fundraising campaign had raised a grand total of $25 million, through an appeal that was entitled, so compellingly, “the Update Campaign.”

The Update Campaign broke all of the University’s fundraising records at the time, but it was a one-time effort, entirely peripheral to campus life -- in fact its office was located on top of a Tip-Top Tailor store, at the corner of Spadina and College -- geographically speaking you couldn’t have located it any further, or more out of sight and out of mind, from the centre of campus.

A few years later, when the Development function was expanded at U of T, under the guise of a new $100 million campaign, because of my leadership of the university’s United Way campaign, I was named Director of Alumni Affairs. 

Allow me a digression to illustrate my real entrance into the field of advancement and how far we have come since then.  As Director of the Career Centre, I had been asked to coordinate the refurbishment of an old building and the move of all of the student services at U of T into the newly created Koffler Student Services Centre.  I had my own hard hat and spent a year with all of the construction workers.  In return they made my office the best office on campus.  They brought me mouldings, a fire place, brand new furniture and every electronic gadget you could imagine!  It was palatial!  I even had a fax machine (remember this was the 80’s).  And then I got my new job and moved to an old house on campus - the alumni building.  On my first day, as I sat on my new desk chair and started coughing from the dust that rose around me, I realized there was no staff except for 2 people.  On asking I found out that the rest were gone for the summer (it was May 1).  I was told that nothing happened in Alumni Relations over the summer and therefore no one worked between May and September.  Next, as I searched for a computer and found none, I asked where I might find the alumni data base.  I was handed a series of shoe boxes with cards in them and then shown a few file cabinets containing the rest of the “A” cards as they were known.  My telephone was a dial phone and as such was not able to be connected to the University’s central phone system. The former director didn’t like push buttons.  And finally, around the middle of June when I noticed a lot of little red bites on my ankles - I was told not to worry - it was the mites from the old window air conditioners and that I would get used to it.

Almost everything has changed over the past three decades in University advancement.  But to a large extent, almost nothing has changed.

It is certainly true that the size of the gifts we are soliciting, and the number of donors and alumni we are stewarding, has risen tremendously.  I can still remember when a $1 million donation would get a donor the equivalent of a ticker tape parade on campus.  The first time I saw a cheque for $1 million dollars I was in Hong Kong in 1990 with the then President of the university, Rob Prichard.  The 2 of us practically jumped up and down holding that cheque.

Back then we had index cards for campaign management. Today we have internet-enabled dashboards.  Back then we would mail VHS tapes of the campaign video and carry around portable televisions with video players.  Today we email flash links.

But then, as is now, we depended on faculty and volunteers to be a key resource in outreach.  We depended on alumni to be the major custodians of our ties to our community.  And we depended on staff, to embody our institutional mission, to work tirelessly, and to bring the full measure of their intelligence, their insight, and their creativity to their work.

When I look back on my career, I am so proud of the life-long relationships I have built and of the friendships I have maintained with a large group of talented men and women who are playing leadership roles in institutional advancement across Canada and around the world.

I am also proud of my work with the volunteers and University leaders whose passion and focus has driven the University of Toronto quite literally from strength to strength.

I have had the privilege of working with many University Presidents, most recently: George Connell, Rob Prichard, Bob Birgeneau and David Naylor.  I have also worked with and learned from the most amazing fundraisers in the business: Gordon Cressy, Jon Dellandrea and now David Palmer.  And the volunteers and donors I have known such as Rose Wolfe, Bill Waters, Marcel Desautels, Wendy Cecil and David Peterson continue to inspire me.

I want to thank once again all of the people who nominated me. Avon MacFarlane from the Offord Group; Cathy Yanosik from York University; Alison Holt from Greenwood College; Hal Koblin from the C.D. Howe Institute; Barbara Track, Barbara Dick and Nancy Reid from the University of Toronto and Suzanne Heft from Upper Canada College.  I am so proud of all of you and I want to thank you so much for your loyalty and friendship.

And I also want to thank my children Ethan and Sasha Manes.  This, as you all know, is a profession that can be all consuming so I want to thank them for making me a more balanced person and for always being there for me.
  
I would like to close by thanking CCAE for the role it has played in making institutional advancement a profession whose members are privileged to play a key role in building our educational institutions.

Education and research are two of the most important keys to our country’s future.  They are essential to our economic prosperity, support our civil society and nurture the arts.

The advancement of education is critical to our national and indeed to our international prosperity.  I say this as someone who has been involved with an educational institution since 1965 and I say this as someone with a long-term stake in the future, as a new grandmother.  Looking back, and looking ahead, I cannot imagine a more fulfilling career path.  And I thank you, on behalf of all of the people whose hard work and accomplishments ensure my own success, for this wonderful award.