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Letter from the President

 Jeffrey A. Milham
President

This year is a real milestone in the history of The Nuckolls Fund. Over the last 18 years, the fund has devoted itself to the development and expansion of educational opportunities in architectural lighting. It has grown from a single $5,000 grant to a grant program now awarding $55,000 annually. With the award of this year's grants, the fund has now awarded a total of $500,000 specifically to support lighting education. During that same period, we have established an endowment that is now worth over $1,300,000 which allows us to continue that work.

In 2007, one $20,000 grant was awarded to Boston Architectural College in Boston Massachusetts to develop and introduce course work for three new half-semester design workshops to be named Introduction to Lighting Principles in Design, Advanced Green Electric Lighting Design Workshop, and Advanced Daylighting Design Workshop. A second $20,000 grant was awarded to Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California to develop and deliver a new ongoing course to be named Advanced Lighting Design Studio: Light, Materials & Technology. This course is being taught by the same faculty both in California and at the Tama Art University in Japan through a collaborative Pacific Rim exchange program between the schools. Kevin Van Den Wymelenberg, Assistant Professor at the University of Idaho in Boise Idaho, was awarded the 2007 $10,000 Edison Price Fellowship Grant to spend a portion of each week for the period of one academic year studying and working at the University of Washington, College of Architecture and Urban Planning and the Integrated Design Lab, Puget Sound as well as the Lighting Design Lab in Seattle. The Nuckolls Fund awarded its $5,000 Jonas Bellovin Scholar Achievement Award to Megan Christen who is presently a student at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Every year there are those contributors who deserve special attention and this year we are most fortunate since we have some significant new contributors as well as several of our annual major contributors. I want to thank B-K Lighting and TEKA Illumination for their ongoing support in raising money for the fund by sponsoring our annual Fun Run/Walk at LIGHTFAIR last May. The Jonas Bellovin Memorial Foundation donated $10,000 as part of their $200,000 pledge in support of the Jonas Bellovin Scholar Achievement Award. The Designers Lighting Forum of New York has been a steadfast financial supporter of the fund since its inception and donated $5,500 this past year. This year the New Jersey Section of the Illuminating Engineering Society moved into the Underwriter category of giving with a donation of $5,000. The New York Section of the Illuminating Engineering Society is another one of our Underwriters and gave an additional $5,000 this year partly in memory of Lesley Wheel and partly in memory of Jules Horton. Nulux Incorporated donated $5,000 in memory of Edison Price and Frank Conti of Enterprise Lighting Sales made a $5,000 donation in memory of Jules Horton.

I'm happy to announce that The Nuckolls Fund obtained a $10,000 donation from a new contributor this year. The Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation made that donation and we are very pleased to have them join us as a Benefactor. Another exceptional pledge has been made by HLB Lighting Design in the amount of $200,000. Starting with an initial donation of $25,000 made this year, the principals at HLB Lighting Design have made a commitment to raise $200,000 in memory of Jules Horton, the founder of their lighting design firm.

It is always really exciting to acknowledge such major contributors, but we are equally grateful for the many smaller contributions we receive throughout the year from individuals and firms. Since our overhead expenses at the fund are less than 2% of our assets, every donation is important to us and truly does make a difference.

One of the many things that the Nuckolls Fund Board does is to make strategic plans for the future of the fund and help develop new grant opportunities. With that in mind, the three professional educators on our Board developed a Nuckolls Fund Performance and Perception Survey. It is my hope that many of you participated in the survey online earlier this year. It generated a 96-page final report of survey findings and we hope to use that data to determine how to best move into the future. We also contacted many of our past grant recipients and asked them to take a brief survey about what they are doing now and whether or not our grant to them was meaningful. Every respondent to that survey indicated that they are still employed in some aspect of lighting or lighting education and each and every one of them stated that their grant was of significant impact on them and their work. We look upon the results of both surveys as positive reinforcement of our work on behalf of lighting design education.

We constantly strive to build on our past successes and with your continued financial support, we will be able to do so. Thank you for your interest in and support of the future of lighting design education.

Sincerely,

Jeffrey A. Milham


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