Multi-year pledges count toward the $30 million goal

Katherine Gorham ’97 is retired now from her fulltime position teaching math at Erie Community College. She still teaches a little; she travels, including a month in France some years; she maintains a yoga discipline; she dotes on her young grandsons. “I live debt-free,” she reports. “It’s a really simple sweet life.”

 “It fits my idea of how I like to give,” says Gorham, who entered the Law School when she was in her 40s for the intellectual challenge. “Nobody calls me, nobody hounds me. They just know the check is going to come. For me it really works.”

Gorham has pledged a steady gift over a three-year period, and in a few years when the law requires her to start drawing from her 403(b) retirement account, she expects she’ll increase that pledge a bit.

“It was just fun,” she says of her years in O’Brian Hall, during which she also maintained a full-time teaching schedule at ECC. “I liked being in school, and I really did like the Law School. I always used to tell everybody that I got into law school reading at an eighth-grade level and got out reading at a much higher level, and fast. It was a terrific experience.”

And of her philanthropy she says, “I don’t give to anything that I don’t know personally.

“I only give to things that are local and that I know. I’ll re-pledge every three years. You need to live debt-free and then give your money away.”

For Robert J. Gutowski ’99, his decision to pledge over five years made budgeting simpler both for him and for the Law School.

“Both in my personal and professional life, I need to know what my income stream is in the future to make decisions,” says Gutowski, who serves as managing director-legal and compliance for the New York City firm MSCI Inc, a provider of decision support tools for investors. “In my professional life, if I want to hire another lawyer at work, I need to know that we’ve got work coming in to pay that person. When you scale that to a budget the size of the Law School’s, an institution of that size trying to live year to year is probably the equivalent of a person living paycheck to paycheck. It’s hard to do anything when you’re in that situation.”

He says the school was flexible in enabling him to structure a plan that worked for him. “I came up with a total number that I thought I was willing to pledge over time,” he says. “It gives the Law School that predictability, and it does enforce the discipline on me to in fact do what I was intending to do.”

Like Gorham, Gutowski says his giving is motivated by “both affection and a sense of gratitude for the school. I wouldn’t give if I didn’t have a sense of allegiance to the school. It all starts with having had a good experience in the Law School, and the good continuing relationship I’ve had with the school since I left.”

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Multi-year pledges have special leverage now, as the Campaign for SUNY Buffalo Law School is just two years from its end. Pledges made now count toward the overall $30 million Campaign goal, even if they extend beyond the end of that fundraising push. It’s a simple way to make an even greater contribution toward securing the future of SUNY Buffalo Law.