The Creative Partnerships Campaign was designed to create the private resource base the UH System and the city require to meet the urgent educational and intellectual challenges of the 21st century. The UH System's strategic plan identified academic priorities for the six years of the campaign. These priorities were narrowed to a core of needs judged to be the most essential and most fundable through private sources based on a pre-campaign survey of 60 community leaders. The official campaign kickoff, by which time approximately 57 percent of the campaign goal had been raised, was March 3, 1992. Private gifts, together with tuition and fees, earned income, and grants and contracts, provide the remainder of the budget.
Private gifts are no substitute for state dollars.
Rather, they give the system universities the flexibility to respond to opportunities, attract and retain outstanding faculty and students, and enhance educational programs and resources. University priorities drove all phases of the campaign, from the centralized Leadership Gifts Phase, when multi-university proposals were developed, to the four distinct but coordinated university campaigns. Each university's priorities were represented in the overall campaign goal in proportion to each university's size and scope. The UH System endowment ranks in the top 25 of public universities in the United States.