About Our Campaign

Old Dominion University has launched “Forward-Focused: For Dreams and Beyond,” a $500 million capital campaign to fund scholarships and research opportunities for students, attract top faculty, invest in health sciences, deliver new athletic scholarships and ensure the campus continues to offer top-caliber, modern facilities for living and learning. With the support of generous donors, the five-year campaign has already raised $275 million.

The campaign will capitalize on the University’s forward momentum, including its recent designation as an R1 Research Institution by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. The effort has defined areas of focus:

• Student Success: $100 million in new scholarship support and $8 million to provide more student-led research opportunities and expand internships and experiential learning.
• Academic Excellence: $85 million to attract world-class faculty, finance additional department chairs and professorships, and provide faculty state-of-the-art technology and equipment.
• Top-Tier Research: $81 million to support ODU’s R1 designation, with a focus on coastal resilience, cybersecurity and data sciences, maritime, and autonomous systems.
• Improving Public Health: $70 million in philanthropic investment in public health, including mental health initiatives, a robust library for the future ONE School of Public Health, a professorship in substance abuse nursing and a chair in mental health nursing. In addition, ODU is planning to establish a Center for Movement Health and Disability.
• Building a World-Class Campus: ODU aims to create a top-caliber campus for living and learning, adding a Data Science facility and Alumni Center, improving the Perry Library and modernizing engineering lab technology.
• Stepping Up Athletics: $120 million to add athletic scholarships and offer the best facilities possible, including expanding and upgrading the baseball stadium.