When the UW Oshkosh access campus in Fond du Lac announced it would close its doors for in-person education starting in June of 2024, the UWO Fond du Lac Foundation was left to figure out how it was still going to run. 

Before the closure of the branch campus, the foundation, which started in 1974, provided scholarships to upcoming and continuing students at UWO Fond du Lac as well as grants for faculty and staff for professional development. 

In January of last year, the UWO Fond du Lac Foundation was rebranded as the UW Fond du Lac Legacy Foundation, becoming a part of the greater Fond du Lac Area Foundation (FDLAF) and joining their Family of Funds.

 “We were saddened by the Universities of Wisconsin’s decision and the loss of access to an important educational option in Fond du Lac,” Corey Bruno, former president of the UWO Fond du Lac Foundation, said in a press release last year. “However, partnering with the Fond du Lac Area Foundation is a great way to continue our mission.” 

Greg Giles, the current executive director of the FDLAF, said that while the original university foundation provided local scholarship support, partnering with the area foundation will continue the mission of supporting students in the area. 

“When UWO Fond du Lac was no longer going to be in existence, they asked the [FDLAF] if we’d be able to kind of help continue on with those scholarships that they had,” he said. “Since we support local students, we thought it’d be a natural fit.” 

A Freedom of Information Act request was sent out to UWO to gather more information about the closure of the Fond du Lac campus, along with the relocation of goods to other Universities of Wisconsin.

In the past five fiscal years of in-person education, the budget for UWO Fond du Lac went from $3,221,773 in 2019 to $2,164,069 in its 2023-2024 fiscal year. For this past year, the budget for the campus went down to $118,861. 

This decline correlates with a statistic in an article for the Advance-Titan about dwindling enrollment at the branch campus, with only 238 students enrolled in the school’s last year of in-person education. According to the newspaper, this number was only 30% of UWO Fond du Lac’s 2010 enrollment total. 

Even with the campus in Fond du Lac closing, Giles said more students in the city will have opportunities to receive grants and scholarships under the wings of the FDLAF, along with the UW Fond du Lac Legacy Foundation.

“In the past, it would have [only] been students attending the UW-Fond du Lac campus, which eventually was the UW Oshkosh campus,” Giles said. “Now there is more opportunity. We have other institutions, Marion University, as well as UW Oshkosh if the criteria lays out for that, as well as Moraine Park Technical College.” 

According to a FDLAF press release from last year, the new UW Fond du Lac Legacy Foundation expanded scholarship eligibility to all new and current students in both Fond du Lac and Dodge County, regardless of where they go to college. 

Giles said that the transition and merger from the UWO-Fond du Lac Foundation to the UW Fond du Lac Legacy Foundation just made sense with the FDLAF’s core values. 

“We already do a lot of scholarship support, so [we thought] it would just be a natural transition for us,” he said.

For Giles, he said the process of transferring recipients from the old foundation was a fairly easy experience for his foundation. 

“So the fund agreements came over, and we met with the donors that were still able to visit,” he said. “With the transition, we [wanted] to continue to honor the donors’ intentions with setting up their gifts.” 

For more information about the FDLAF and the UW Fond du Lac Legacy Foundation, visit https://fdlareafoundation.com/.