The Waterloo Engineering Endowment Fund, believed to be the first and largest student-run endowment fund in Canada, has just passed the $10 million plateau. To mark the milestone students and others celebrated with cake in the foyer of Carl Pollock Hall on November 17. The fund, better known by its acronym WEEF, was created in 1990 by engineering students John Vellinga and Avi Belinsky to help fund student projects and support student teams above and beyond what was provided by the university.
WEEF has resulted in the purchase of equipment for teams such as the university’s Midnight Sun Solar Race Car Team, Formula SAE Race Car Team, Waterloo Rocketry Team and Clean Snowmobile Team, computers and monitors for undergraduate labs, a distillation column for chemical engineering, 3D printers for the Waterloo School of Architecture in Cambridge and circuit hardware for electrical and computer engineering. WEEF donated $1 million to the Engineering 5 building’s unique state-of-the-art student design centre, which opened in October 2010.
“Reaching the $10 million mark in just 21 years is a huge accomplishment and a real tribute to engineering’s undergraduate students,” said WEEF director Laurin Benson, a third-year chemical engineering student. “The fund has provided students with a sense of ownership and pride in Waterloo Engineering.”
The largest source of donations to WEEF is a voluntary, tax-deductible $75 fee engineering students pay each term. Other donations come from employer matching contributions and engineering alumni, including the graduating students’ Plummer’s Pledge. Interest from the fund is spent on special projects submitted by engineering students and voted on by elected representatives from each undergraduate engineering class. That amount will total $180,000 for the 2011/2012 academic year.