University of Central Arkansas gets $20 million donation
A historic donation was made Tuesday afternoon to the University of Central Arkansas.
A whopping $20 million, the largest gift the university has received in its 111-year history, was donated by the Windgate Foundation. Prior to this, the largest gifts made to UCA included a $5.6 million donation in 1996 from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation for Reynolds Performance Hall, and a $3 million gift from Conway Corp in 2014 to build the Conway Corporation Center for Sciences.
The donation will support construction of the Windgate Center for Fine and Performing Arts. The 114,000-square-foot facility includes 44,000-square-feet of art space, a concert hall, a proscenium theater, class space, a studio, along with rehearsal and design space.
The Windgate gift marks the kickoff to a new comprehensive capital campaign for the school, which is expected to kick off in the fall.
Currently more than 250 students major or minor in art and roughly 750 additional students major in other fine arts and communications related areas. Davis said the arts program and others at UCA are at capacity, and that the new facility will allow the school's fine and performing arts programs to grow.
"As with a lot of opportunities, you look to what are your priorities, what are those things that are going to be central to your forward mission," said Davis.
"This was something that we knew had a tremendous amount of support internally and identifying Windgate Foundation and others externally that might want to partner with us - that's certainly where that conversation began and we were thankful that led to a very fruitful relationship."
Design and site work have yet to be completed for the project. The building is expected to be built at the intersection of Donaghey Avenue and Bruce Street, across the street from another relatively new building - Donaghey Hall.
WCFPA will be built on the current site of the UCA Speech Language Hearing Center. Officials say a small number of speech pathology classes are still held in the building that occupies an old church on campus. Those classes will move into the school's new Integrated Health Sciences Building which has an expected open date of fall 2021.
"We knew that there were a number of interests in providing funding for the arts," said Houston Davis, UCA President. "This will allow us to be able to go out and engage with other donors, bring other private money to the table and really be able to leverage a scarce public dollar with the number of private dollars and do something there's no way we could do without that partnership."UCA says $19 million of the funds will go toward the new building. The remaining $1 million from the Windgate Foundation will go to the Windgate Scholarship Fund. The Windgate Center for Fine and Performing Arts has an estimated cost of $45 million.
