What does it mean to be bold?
Our cover sends you here to find out. That’s where you’ll find our in-depth feature story on the Boldly Buffalo campaign, the biggest fundraising initiative in the university’s history. The campaign is certainly bold—rooted in an inspirational vision of who we are and where we’re going, and focused on the ambitious goals of transforming the student experience, empowering our faculty to solve the major challenges of our era, and improving lives in Buffalo and around the world.
But boldness at UB doesn’t start or end with a campaign. It’s a defining characteristic of who we are as an institution; it was that before we started counting campaign dollars and it will be that long after we’ve reached our $650 million goal. That’s why you could go to almost any story in this issue and find an answer to the question, What does it mean to be bold?
You could go here, for example, and read about a woman who navigated every obstacle put in her way as a rising executive in the male-dominated retail industry to finally become a CEO—and then left it all behind to lead a nonprofit dedicated to girls. Or here, where you’ll discover that the 86-year-old Jim Horne—the former UB basketball star who then played with the Harlem Globetrotters—isn’t spending his golden years resting on his impressive laurels; instead he’s teaching hundreds of inner-city kids the game of golf, helping to set them on a course to success in life. Or here, to learn about the boldly futuristic cryogenics research undertaken by chemist Xiaoxi Wei, who, as a child, saw her grandfather die from cirrhosis of the liver, and determined then and there she was going to discover a better way to preserve organs.
As these and so many other stories in At Buffalo illustrate, we are a tenacious bunch. We pursue our dreams and reinvent ourselves without fear. But it’s never just about us; at the root of all our endeavors is the desire to make the world a brighter place. We seek to save lives through more effective organ preservation. We break through barriers of discrimination and then fight to keep the gates open for others. We pass our knowledge and our lessons learned to the next generation, determined to give all young people a chance—in sport and in life.
And that brings us back to our cover story. When you give to UB, you’re not just supporting an institution. You’re investing in a shared belief, backed up by hard work and real discoveries and actual lives improved, that we can, in the words of alumnus and donor West Richter, “leave things better than when we arrived.”
Laura Silverman, Editorial Director