For 24 hours, donors rallied together to help Cornell University reach for the stars on its eleventh Giving Day, March 13, 2025.
This year’s space-themed event raised $11,206,717 from 17,591 donors, for a total of 25,929 gifts making a tangible show of support for causes across the university.
“Cornellians everywhere demonstrated their continued commitment to our founding principles and mission to do the greatest good,” says Fred Van Sickle, vice president for Alumni Affairs and Development (AAD). “In these times of great uncertainty for higher education, the results of Giving Day 2025 help the university provide an exceptional educational experience for its students and bolster our impact around the world.”
Donors from all 50 US states and and 67 countries gave to a record number of 765 funds across colleges, student organizations, scholarships, special projects, and more. Alumni, students, parents, faculty, staff, and friends contributed to a record 190 matches and challenges, unlocking more than $2 million to extend the reach of their gifts and amplify their impact.
Star-power students 🌟
Seventeen Giving Day events across Cornell’s Ithaca campus and Cornell Tech in New York City drew in 1,620 students with giveaways, snacks, postcard writing, and games. This year, students contributed 2,122 gifts across undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools, helping support areas that made a difference in their own experiences on the Hill.
“Giving Day is important for students like me because it’s an opportunity to give back to any causes that made an impact on me, whether that be a student organization, or an engineering project team, or a department,” says Victor Wu ’25, co-chair of the Senior Class Campaign.
Wu is in a dual degree program, already on track to earn his master’s of health administration from the Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy next year. He was a beneficiary of the Sloan Forward Fund, which helps students attend conferences like the American Congress of Healthcare Executives, and he chose to give back to the Brooks School and other causes for Giving Day 2025 to pay it forward.
“As we turn into the future generation of alumni,” Victor says, “giving back is what’s going to continue driving the work that is getting done here, what shaped us into who we are.”
Emma Rose Connoly ’25, president of the Alumni Affairs Student Engagement Committee, and a member of the Senior Class Campaign, made it a priority to donate to an annual fund through her class campaign.
“I wanted to help another student—any student—be able to get the resources that I was able to have these past four years,” Emma Rose says. “Financial aid is something very important for me, because it’s helped me be able to afford and be able to be a student at Cornell.”
“Without people’s donations, we can’t innovate and we can’t expand as a community. Giving Day helps students to be able to succeed, whether it’s next year, or five years from now,” she adds.
Celestial Giving Day stats
- Recent alumni had a strong Giving Day showing, totaling 3,453 gifts from the Classes of 2015–2024 in undergraduate, graduate and professional schools.
- 512 Giving Day champions brought in over 4,000 gifts for causes closest to their hearts.
- More than 1,450 students unlocked $50,000 for undergraduate scholarships with a student donor challenge from Board of Trustees Chair Kraig Kayser MBA ’84.
- More than 450 international donors unlocked $5,000 for Global Cornell, thanks to members of the Cornell Asia Alumni Leadership Advisors (CAALA), and $5,000 for the East Asia Program, thanks to the Cornell China Alumni Advisory Board (C-CAAB).
- Social media challengers unlocked $8,000 as alumni spread the word on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
- Four students competed an in-person scavenger hunt to find stuffed bears hidden across Cornell’s Ithaca campus, each winning $500 for their preferred college or unit.
Stellar offerings for Giving Day
This year’s Giving Day game was out of this world.
Touchdown’s Space Mission lets players choose between three different galactic bears and guide their character between flying saucer beams and the top of a futuristic McGraw Tower to collect celestial pumpkins. These pumpkins translated into real-life funds—$2,500 split amongst the top five annual funds chosen by players. The player with the highest score also earned an additional $500 for their donation area of choice.
Eager gamers played nearly 20,000 times over the course of the day, and collected 72,620 pumpkins. The Cornell Library received an astronomic number of 16,434 pumpkins, followed by the ILR School, Cornell CALS, Cornell Engineering, and the Lab of Ornithology.
Want to try and eclipse the high score of 18 pumpkins? You can still play here.
Cornellians were also greeted by a new Giving Day quiz this year, with seven questions to forecast your Cornell Giving Day star sign. More than 600 participants took the quiz help find the Giving Day causes that might resonate with them the most.
