Giving at Lake Forest College

Gifts to the Fund for Lake Forest College support all aspects of the College and provide broad, annual, and essential support for everyone in the Forester community. You can choose how your gift is directed: where it's needed most, arts/humanities, athletics, career services, facilities/beatification, faculty, scholarships, or sciences—just to name a few.

Individual gifts of every size from alumni, parents, and friends provide $2.6 million in annual support that has a direct and immediate impact on our students. More than 4,000 alumni, parents, and friends support this dynamic fund every year.

Click here to support the Fund for Lake Forest College.

Lake Forest College is committed to admitting highly qualified students regardless of their ability to pay. We admit students who are smart, well-rounded, and prepared to accept the challenges of a rigorous undergraduate education. While students with financial need often get assistance from government sources, this support alone is rarely sufficient. Merit and need-based scholarships are essential for Lake Forest to attract and retain the best students.

Donors can establish named endowed scholarships with gift commitments of $50,000 or more. Annual scholarships can be established with annual gift commitments of $2,500 or more. A future gift named as part of a donor’s estate plan can be designated to establish a named endowed scholarship.

Click here to support student scholarships.

Established in 2016, the Spike Initiative honors Francis B. “Spike” Gummere, Jr., who joined the Lake Forest College staff in 1968 as Director of Admissions and has been an integral part of the campus community for five decades. Over the years, Spike has provided guidance to, mentored, and admitted thousands of students, always holding firm to his belief in looking for people with potential and the ability to grow.

Hundreds of adoring alumni, parents, and friends have contributed to this fund in Spike’s honor, which funds the new “Gummere Fellows” program and permanently endowed “The Gummere Admissions Fund.” Click here to read more about this initiative.

The renovation and expansion of Young Hall, once known as College Hall, will soon be renamed Brown Hall upon renovation completion. It will feature contemporary new classrooms and student spaces designed for 21st-century teaching and learning, as well as a state-of-the-art addition that will double its size.

Brown Hall will be the future home of the Career Advancement Center, Communication, Economics, Business, and Finance, History, Mathematics, Computer Science, and Data Science, and Politics and International Relations.

Your support will give all of our students an invaluable edge as they pursue their careers.

This fall the College began the second phase of the Mohr Field and Halas Hall Locker Rooms Project, this includes the addition of essential equipment for Mohr Field and the creation of new locker rooms for lacrosse, along with related enhancements for the soccer and football locker rooms. Each space will include new sport-specific wood lockers, updated restrooms, showers, and storage. The goal for completion of Phase II is August 2021.

Click here to support this project.

The Board of Trustees endorsed an initiative to raise funds to add new positions for faculty of color. In making this endorsement, the Board recognized:

• We have fewer faculty of color as a proportion of total faculty than students of color as a proportion of the total student body.
• Students of color are projected to constitute a still larger proportion of our student body over the next decade, as will be the case at colleges nationwide. 

Generous donors have already committed $1 million to cover two new positions for faculty of color over the next five years. The College needs to raise $4 million in endowment to support the positions permanently. The College also needs to raise another $2 million in endowment gifts to provide permanent support for anti-racist studies and training for students, faculty and staff; academic programming in African American Studies and Latin American Studies; the College’s annual Diversity Summit; and related priorities.

In partnership with Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, the College launched a new Health Professions Program (HPP) that will offer students direct pathways from our undergraduate majors to graduate and professional degree programs at RFU, including medicine, pharmacy, healthcare administration, healthcare data science, physical therapy, and still others. 

The College and RFU faculty and students are also actively collaborating in cutting-edge laboratory research projects. Moreover, in one more year, the College and RFU expect to launch a joint Master’s Program in Nursing Practice that will prepare nurses to assume highly skilled and leadership positions at Northwestern Lake Forest Hospital and other area hospitals. Students in the Master’s Program will spend three years on our campus and two years at RFU. 

Click here to read more about the Health Professions Program (HPP).