Imagining and creating communities together: A relational approach to fundraising

Lynn Harter is professor and co-director of the Barbara Geralds Institute for Storytelling and Social Impact. She was the top-raising advocate for OHIO Giving Day in 2024. We invited her, along with Associate Professor, Associate Chair, Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine Joseph A. Bianco and Chief Video Producer at the Barbara Geralds Institute for Storytelling and Social Impact Megan Westervelt, to reflect on how faculty and staff can participate in OHIO Giving Day 2025.

At the Barbara Geralds Institute for Storytelling and Social Impact, we work alongside community members to surface and amplify voices previously unheard, unacknowledged, or dismissed. Embedded within the University but with footprints in the region, the institute witnesses, curates, shares, and studies storytelling in its many shapes and forms. As such, we have two unique advantages in crowd-source fundraising: Crafting narratives that resonate with the public and empowering dedicated advocates to do the same.

Why do we participate in OHIO’s Giving Day?

The institute’s base budget is composed of endowment dividends. The benefit of an endowment is that it supports the institute in perpetuity. The deceptive part of operating from an endowment, though, is that interest on principal investments fluctuate with the market. Philanthropic support enhances our capacity to prioritize projects that involve community partners and provide experiential learning opportunities for students. Funds raised on Giving Day have a profound effect on the institute’s capacity to empower students to discover and develop their knowledge and skills in service to others.

How do we participate in OHIO’s Giving Day?

The institute’s work is always already relational. In living our mission, we seek to understand the values, lived experiences, needs, and worldviews of people whose stories we amplify. When your mission rests on creating and holding space for others to be known and heard on their own terms, a relational approach for events like Giving Day is a natural extension of everyday organizing.

Embarking from a relational foundation, we begin our Giving Day campaign by mapping our existing network and identifying potential advocates: individuals with a strong connection to the institute. Our advocates are as diverse as our projects and include alumni, friends of the university, and members of the public at large who have witnessed the institute’s impact. We invite advocates to see their participation as part of a greater movement to imagine a world where storytelling creates just and joyful communities.

We encourage advocates to leverage multiple channels of communication on Giving Day from email outreach to social media advocacy, virtual meet-ups, and text messages. Below is a post from one of our devoted advocates, Stacia Taylor, who offered her personal testimonial alongside pre-crafted text we sent to all advocates. “As a former student athlete and entrepreneur, I was thrilled to see the Barbara Gerald Institute come to fruition and positively impact many students, mentors and community members in various ways,” Taylor said in the post.

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Advocates’ personal testimonials are the most important part of any message they share. Here is an example from another dedicated advocate, Dr. Taylor Walker, who shared our post and added her own testimonial about her time at OHIO to strengthen our story with her voice. “None of [my] experiences and opportunities would have been possible without the resources of the Storytelling Institute,” Walker’s post read.

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What have we learned about giving to OHIO along the way?

One of the most important aspects of our Giving Day campaign is ensuring we are transparent about how we will steward the donated funds. Stewardship has been at the heart of how the institute thrives from its very inception, made possible by the generosity of Barbara Geralds’ endowment. We continue that legacy with diligence and gratitude for every dollar donated.

In the end, our most powerful stories are those we craft together, especially alongside change makers who have our mission at heart. The Storytelling Institute’s mission requires us to enter the lived experiences of others, to absorb and reflect their stories, and, in the process, join those stories to co-create something larger. Giving Day, then, becomes an extension of the quality of these relationships. Inviting advocates to lean into their own experiences to foster possibilities for current and future students has proven instrumental in our Giving Day campaign experience.