DeAnna R. Burt-Nanna

Institutional advancement and resource development are more than just fundraising for a community college president. Of course, fundraising is an important component of the job, but it is also about bringing various resources—media, attention, collaboration, partnerships—to your institution. All these pursuits can be interwoven, and it can take time for a new president to get comfortable in the role, but in my experience, having a good sense of self is the first step. The ability to showcase your institution to diverse audiences with authenticity and passion all begins with the ability to genuinely tell your own story.

When I became a college president, the thing for which I felt most insecure was this notion of the college president as chief resource developer. As President of Monroe Community College (Monroe), my effectiveness at bringing resources to my institution became an essential skill and an evaluative criterion. For some, this reality alone could be enough to cause potential candidates to rethink a career as a college president. However, consider that you just might be more prepared than you know.

I came to that realization during an exercise at a women’s leadership conference. The facilitator invited the audience to make a list of the things they had done to convince others that an idea, request, or perspective was worthy of their agreement. What I expected to be a very short list kept growing.

From negotiating parental consent to stay out beyond my teenage curfew and writing compelling student success proposals that secured national funding to pushing back on educators and physicians who too quickly wrote off my special needs child and securing career advancement and negotiating terms of employment . . . maybe I was more prepared than I knew. But how and where did I learn this skill? In part, it was by just being me, along with being offered—or creating—the opportunity to do so.

I am authentic, and people find this intriguing. I lead resiliently, transform boldly, and elevate myself and others purposefully. I listen intently, and people tell me that conversing with me is easy and interesting. I am realistic and reflective, and this combination keeps me humble. I am passionate and resilient. I am honest and reliable, and this facilitates trust. These reflect my core values, personality, and leadership traits, which translate into how I present myself and engage with others.

Knowing yourself, and from where and how your own personal story intertwines with that of your institution and community, is the beginning of framing the ask.

My story begins as the daughter of a military veteran, community servants, and philanthropists and as the granddaughter of a sharecropper who was convinced that education was so essential to his daughter’s success that he risked his life for my mother to escape laboring in the cotton fields of the South to attain it. This catalyzed the educational trajectory of generations of his offspring.

With some postsecondary attainment for themselves, my parents struggled at times to pay their bills and had no savings to send me to college, even though I graduated salutatorian of my high school class. A solution came while working alongside a friend at our part-time job as teens; her father was a recruiter for what would later become my college alma mater. The moral of that story is that developing good relationships, which in this case included a willingness to be vulnerable and disclose a need, can have unpredictable benefits.

I grew up in Michigan, in a city of low- and middle-income persons fraught with depleting tax bases due to the exodus of major employers. I had, and still have, friends who grew up without their basic needs consistently being met. This is strikingly similar to Monroe’s community in Rochester, New York, home of Kodak, Xerox, and Bausch and Lomb, and the lived experiences of the students we proudly serve.

So, when I am telling Monroe’s story, I am telling my story. It begins with me, the CEO, the chief resource developer. Progress is already evident, and this article will feature a few of those achievements. They illustrate how partnerships, trust, and relationships made it all possible for our community.

First, Know Thyself

By knowing yourself, you can also work to secure opportunities for your institution. Here are some key tips and strategies for positioning yourself as an effective cultivator of external resources.

• Start with onboarding. As a new president, proactively identify key partners and engage them early in your tenure.
• Identify your college’s strengths, opportunities for growth, and capacity for impact.
• Develop strategies to leverage those strengths. ​
• Know your institutional position. Are you starting your tenure from a deficit or an advantage?
• Acknowledge the efforts of your predecessors, then build upon them.
• Tell your story. Connect your personal story and the story of your college to others’ interests and desires; where necessary, calm fears.

There are four primary sources that you’ll need to cultivate to help secure resources for your institution. Some projects will have a combination of these funding sources.

• Foundation/Philanthropy
• Governmental Agencies
• Federal Grants and Awards
• Partnerships With Employers and Others

Foundation/Philanthropy

At Monroe, we are fortunate to have the MCC Foundation, a stalwart of excellence which in 2024 the Council for Advancement and Support of Education ranked first in total giving and restricted giving among all State University of New York (SUNY) community colleges, and which has been in the top three since 2018.

To address the need to create a stronger nursing workforce pipeline to fill current and future employment needs for local healthcare organizations, we have worked with the Louis S. and Molly B. Wolk Foundation and the Finger Lakes Performing Provider System (FLPPS). The Wolk Foundation has made several investments in Monroe’s healthcare training programs over the years. ​In 2022, they responded to a community need for an expanded skilled workforce by making a new $1.2 million investment to build out modular healthcare training labs at Monroe’s Downtown Campus.

In 2023, FLPPS, Monroe, and others partnered to establish a sustainable model for long-term career pathways that expand the healthcare workforce pool, ​investing $4 million in project funding, with Monroe as the initiative’s lead community college.

Since 2014, Monroe has been the site of the Be a Healthy Hero Summer Camp for Rochester City School District children ages 6 to 13 to stay physically and intellectually active. In summer 2025, the camp educated 800 children in math and language arts, and provided sessions on nutrition, character development, music, drug and alcohol avoidance, and teambuilding. The camp, which helps reduce health and learning declines that can occur over the summer months, is made possible with the generous support of private philanthropy in partnership with the MCC Foundation.

Government Agencies/Federal Grants and Awards

The college president must also maintain healthy government relations. In states like New York, where the community college funding formula accounts for state and county funding, these partners are vital to the institution’s fiscal health. For example, Monroe has successfully worked with our county government to secure funds for operations and capital projects such as our new Advanced Technology Center (ATC), set to open in fall 2026.

At a cost of $69 million, with $34.5 million being split 50/50 by the county and SUNY, the new ATC includes $20 million in funding to scale our optics and photonics program to meet growing demand for talent in the semiconductor industry. Illustrating the importance of robust relationships at all levels of government, this same project is being federally funded ($3.5 million) with the help of our congressional leaders, Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, and Congressman Joseph Morelle.

Monroe also contributed to the development of the proposal that led to Rochester securing a Federal Tech Hub designation through our work with U.S. Senator Charles Schumer’s office and others. The NY SMART I-Corridor Tech Hub designation, a partnership with Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse, New York, positions the region as a globally recognized semiconductor manufacturing hub in the next decade.

This designation drives the need for skilled technicians in disciplines for which Monroe is well positioned to foster talent, putting more people into good-payingjobs with family-sustaining wages, and reversing the effects of poverty across our community while bolstering the talent pipeline for the state. One way I support this regional approach to workforce development is via my service as Co-Chair of the Finger Lakes Regional Economic Development Council.

Federal grants can also provide the opportunity to scale programs and services for which your college has already achieved success. For Monroe, one of those areas is our internationally and nationally recognized optics program.

As the first community college in the world to graduate students with an optics and photonics associate’s degree, we worked with the U.S. Department of Defense’s Manufacturing Engineering Education Program to successfully receive a $5.1 million, three-year grant in 2023 to allow Monroe to strengthen our optics and photonics degree programs. This multiyear grant will help provide workers with the skills they need for major local employers.

Partnerships With Employers and Others

When it comes to showcasing a premier partnership between a community college with area employers and a host of public and private partners, you will be hard-pressed to find a better example than the Finger Lakes Workforce Development Center (FWD Center), located on Monroe’s Downtown Campus.

The FWD Center is a $11.4 million, 50,000 square foot state-of-the-art regional workforce development facility focusing on short-term and accelerated technology-oriented training programs that place individuals in high-demand jobs. In 2022-2023, during its first year of operation, 33 employers and organizations in the public and private sectors provided workforce training through the FWD Center​.

To illustrate the ongoing nature of fundraising, since opening the FWD Center, the MCC Foundation has continued to secure other funding, such as an additional $250,000 from Bank of America to build out a portion of the FWD Center and $5.4 million from the Ralph C. Wilson, Jr., Foundation to support FWD Center operations.

Another example of an innovative partnership with a global business partner, L3 Harris Technologies, was the launch this year of the fully funded L3Harris Technical Training Program, which covers the cost of attendance for New York residents and employees of L3 Harris who are enrolled at our college. Other Monroe students also benefit from the college’s relationships with employers that provide tuition assistance, such as Optimax, Xerox, Kodak, and Micron.

These are some of the accomplishments Monroe has made in cultivating relationships with key partners. They illustrate our community’s and state’s appreciation and understanding of the vital role we play in fueling workforce and economic development, including economic mobility across all zip codes.

Understanding the role of your college in your community’s landscape, as well as yourself and how your story informs and extends your college’s mission through the cultivation of relationships, can open doors of opportunity in the president and CEO’s role as chief resource developer.