Emporia State University began interviewing candidates Monday for its chief fund-raising job. The first candidate interviewed was Sandra Fruit of Newton.
If hired, Fruit would become the president of the ESU Foundation and director of university advancement. Two other candidates, Judith Heasley of Durango, Colo., and Wendell Snodgrass of Topeka, are also being considered.
Fruit is vice president of development for Prairie View, a Christian-based mental-health hospital in Newton. Prior to that, she held fund-raising positions with Kansas State University and with Pratt County Community College.
She came into fund raising by accident, she told a campus audience Monday at the ESU Memorial Union.
“I started out in public relations and marketing at Pratt County Community College,” Fruit said. “I kept telling the president that Pratt needed a resource-development position. I kept nagging him for a year or two and he said ‘You’re right and I want you to fill it.’
“That had not been my motivation,” she added with a small chuckle and a grin. “Not at all.”
She soon found it was a job she loved, getting people to move from uncertainty to eagerness about giving. The hardest part, she said, was getting that first appointment to see somebody and tell them her story,
“Once you’re sitting across a desk or a kitchen table from a person, it’s easy, because then you can solve a problem,” Fruit said.
The stakes got higher when she went to Kansas State University in 1997 after 10 years with Pratt. She arrived at KSU just in time for the start of a $45 million campaign — one that ended up raising $60 million — and left just after the university had started a new $1 billion drive with $600 million to come from private donations.
At Prairie View, she found fund-raising efforts were languishing and had to be stepped up. The most important thing there, she said, was reassuring the staff that they were capable of doing this.
“Once that was done and they were convinced and interested, we got geared up, met more people, put more money on the table and entirely reached our goal,” Fruit said.
Private fund raising has become more important to state universities as state support has diminished. Last September, a Kansas Board of Regents study found that state funding only covered 29 percent of the operating costs for a public university in Kansas.
Tes Mehring, the dean of The Teachers College, asked Fruit how she would work with the deans. As much as they want, Fruit replied.
“You always feel fortunate when you find deans who enjoy fund raising,” Fruit said. “What the deans can do better than anyone else is speak with passion about their programs.”