Successful campaign a game-changer for USask
The record $570,739,155 raised in the university’s Be What the World Needs campaign has been invested in USask projects, priorities, and places.
In 2015, a $12.25-million gift from celebrated USask alumnus Merlis Belsher sparked the construction of the Merlis Belsher Place community facility. A decade later, on June 18, 2025, 1,000 supporters gathered there for a campaign wind-up celebration. At that event, USask announced it had surpassed its half-a-billion dollar fundraising target by more than $70 million, thanks to the generosity of more than 27,000 donors from 44 countries around the world.
In all, more than 2,600 initiatives are now being funded from donations big and small, including from corporate partners such as Nutrien ($15 million) and Cameco ($10 million), and from generous USask alumni like Ron and Jane Graham, the university’s largest individual donors with a history of more than $50 million in lifetime contributions to their alma mater. Complementing major multi-million-dollar gifts were smaller individual contributions from tens of thousands of graduates of the university, with one out of every nine alumni donating to the campaign.
In addition to contributing to a new state-of-the-art Design Hub in the College of Engineering, research facilities that received campaign funding include the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO), the Livestock and Forage Centre of Excellence, the Ron and Jane Graham Sport Science and Health Centre, and the Allard-Roozen Imaging Suite at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine.
Donor gifts also funded innovative teaching facilities, including the Jane and Ron Graham Centre for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, the BJ Hughes Centre for Clinical Learning, as well as the Rawlinson Finance and Trading Room, the Melvin Berg Classroom, and the Art Korpach Family Classroom in the Edwards School of Business. Other projects that benefited from campaign gifts include the K.W. Nasser Tennis Courts, the Queer Housing Lounge, the planned Huskie clubhouse expansion project at Griffiths Stadium in Nutrien Park, and many more.