Focus area
Advancement & Innovation
Finding alignment around our most pressing opportunities.
The ecosystem
Academic institutions are leaders of innovation within a rich ecosystem
Students, researchers, and faculty generate ideas. New technologies need development & demonstration support. Campuses are living labs to decarbonize, while supporting an energy-resilient, water-efficient, circular economy. Foundations, venture capital, and philanthropists are looking to support sustainability innovations and community-engaged solutions.
Our team is ready to collaborate on ideas that advance your institution's mission, while fostering innovation and creative problem-solving on campus.
Capabilities
Four places where we help
Priority mapping
Surfacing where stakeholder interests are aligned.
Philanthropic strategy
Shaping initiatives so they are fundable: named, scoped, and matched to the right funder.
Donor materials
Cases for support, concept papers, and briefing documents leadership can carry into a meeting.
Partnership development
Structuring industry and nonprofit engagements for success.
Turning a concept into a funded education center
Updraft supported a research university to develop, secure funding, and establish a new center for sustainability education. The center’s purpose is to embed sustainability across every college and school rather than concentrating it in a single department, while building faculty capacity, student pathways, and experiential learning alongside the curriculum work.
The gift was structured as a five-year investment rather than an endowment, which meant the center had to show visible progress and develop programs built to last beyond the funding period. Updraft supported the university in translating the proposed gift into an operating center: a multi-year budget, a staffing and program structure, and a launch plan that leadership, the donor, and the campus could all work from. We worked alongside the senior sustainability office where the center sits and the faculty director leading it.
What we supported
- Multi-year operating budget with a topline view, detailed line items, and linked outputs with KPIs for each program
- Personnel modeling with salary assumptions, phased hiring, and annual escalation across the five-year funding period
- Program design and costing across faculty fellowships, curriculum integration, student scholars, and traveling delegations
- Peer benchmarking of comparable university sustainability education units to size staffing and program spend
- Workplan development and milestone tracking
- Narrative and briefing materials for donor, senior leadership, and campus audiences
$10M
investment secured, tied to named programs and measurable outputs.
The result
The center launched and in its first year has an inaugural faculty fellows cohort, curriculum ambassadors, sustainability-across-the-curriculum training for faculty, a student scholars program, climate communication coordinators, and funded student pathways into sustainability careers.
Get in touch
Some work can't wait.
Tell us what you're trying to accomplish, and we'll tell you honestly whether we're the right partner.
Start a conversation