A career epidemiologist at Hopkins, Diane Becker knows a lot about searching for things, so when she volunteered to help garner support for a gift to Johns Hopkins School of Nursing’s building addition, she applied her investigatory skills to finding people — lots of people.
Her detective work paid off. Working with a committee of Class of 1964 Nursing graduates and leveraging a plethora of search tools, Becker reached some 100 classmates about funding a terrace in the building addition. The vast majority of the class contributed with current and planned gifts, raising more than $500,000.
“You get a sense that the whole class pulled together,” says Becker, who also holds master’s and doctorate degrees from the Bloomberg School of Public Health. “A sense of unity is what we wanted to show and to have a legacy.”
The Class of 1964 Terrace is part of a 45,000 square-foot expansion to the School of Nursing’s Anne M. Pinkard Building located on the Johns Hopkins East Campus in Baltimore. An additional 25,000 square feet of the building was renovated, and the overall structure is open and bright with flexible learning classrooms, a more prominent entrance, and expansive glass surfaces. And while the building is future-oriented, it honors the school’s mission of preparing nurse leaders — something that was especially meaningful to Class of 1964 graduates.
“I just feel good to be able to contribute in a positive and concrete way,” says class member Lynne Wolfe, a nurse care manager for a behavioral health home program in Maine. “My hope is that the terrace will remind people of the history of the school — that it is built on the backs and life experiences of the classes that came before them.”
The Class of 1964 Terrace is situated off of the building’s fifth floor outside of the dean’s suite. Martha Hill, the school’s dean from 2001 to 2014, joined her 1964 classmates in raising funds for the terrace and contributed her own gift. To her, the space symbolizes the class’s cohesiveness and commitment.
“We were a class that liked being together and enjoyed gatherings,” she says. “Supporting the terrace as a space and a place where you could celebrate the value of relationships that are formed within the classes and among the classes greatly appealed to us.
Topics: Alumni, School of Nursing, Strengthening Partnerships