Dear Campus Community Members:
Erica Marks, who has served SUNY New Paltz and its more than 74,000 living alumni as Vice President for Development & Alumni Relations and Executive Director of the SUNY New Paltz Foundation for the last 12 years, has shared her plans to retire from these roles effective Sept. 26, 2025.
Marks has presided over a transformative era for alumni engagement and the culture of philanthropy at our University, helping to create deep and lasting benefits for students today and into the future.
As the lead for all institutional fundraising activities, Marks has been instrumental in helping New Paltz achieve advancement targets that would have seemed out of reach just a few short years ago. As just one illustration: SUNY New Paltz has received more than $6.3 million in philanthropic gifts in just the first half of 2025, more than four times the $1.5 million the University received in all of 2014.
Across the same time period, the value of student scholarships awarded has increased from $276,000 in fiscal year 2014 to more than $1.1 million awarded in fiscal year 2025. These donor-supported scholarships create opportunities for enriching learning experiences that would not have been available to students otherwise. In many cases, through programs like the Student Crisis Fund, these awards have made the difference in students’ ability to successfully complete their degrees.
Beyond scholarships, the impact of donations and the philanthropic infrastructure built by Marks with the partnership of her staff, the volunteer board and campaign cabinets can be seen across campus in academic departments, athletics, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art and the Hudson Valley Additive Manufacturing Center, among other core units and programs. Most schools and departments now have donor-funded spendable program accounts that provide students and faculty with income to purchase equipment and support field trips and conference attendance.
The successes in the Office of Development & Alumni Relations during Marks’ time as Vice President are too numerous to list here, but some especially noteworthy achievements include:
- Endowment growth from $13 million in 2011 to $44.6 million as of this writing;
- Stewardship and fulfillment of Soaring Higher, SUNY New Paltz’s first-ever comprehensive campaign, which ultimately raised more than $24.7 million in philanthropic support;
- Initiation of the University’s second campaign, Beyond the Ridge, which will launch publicly in the near future;
- Creation of the Alumni Council, replacing the Alumni Association as the primary body that interacts with the University on behalf of all alumni;
- Acquisition of the largest gift in campus history: a $6.37 million contribution that created the Science of Reading Center at SUNY New Paltz, which in just two years has provided literacy-based professional development to tens of thousands of educators in New York and beyond. That success prompted the donors to give an additional $1 million to continue these efforts;
- Acquisition of several major gifts of $1 million or more from living individual donors;
- Expansion and diversification of the SUNY New Paltz Foundation Board of Directors, whose mission is to seek, secure and manage gifts and grants to fund scholarships and programs that enrich and support the academic, cultural and community life of SUNY New Paltz, and to build a lasting endowment for the University’s future;
- Achieved 100% giving by Directors on the Foundation Board;
- Establishment of new initiatives to strengthen the ties between alumni, students, community stakeholders and the institution at large, including the Women’s Leadership Summit, 40 Under Forty and the Hudson Valley Future Summit.
Jonathan Vaughn, who currently serves as Executive Director of Development, has agreed to take on the roles of Interim Vice President for Development & Alumni Relations and Interim Executive Director of the SUNY New Paltz Foundation upon Marks’ retirement. Barbara Caldwell ’22g, who served as Program Director for Donor Engagement until her 2023 retirement, will return to New Paltz to support this transition as Vaughn’s deputy. More details about these plans will be communicated later this year.
We hope you will join us in celebrating Erica Marks’ many valuable contributions to SUNY New Paltz and in congratulating her on this milestone.
Darrell P. Wheeler
President
