More Than $1-Million Raised for Charities Created After Virginia Tech's Tragedy

By Holly Hall

More than $1-million has been raised by charities seeking to help Virginia Tech recover from the murderous rampage that left 33 people dead last week.

The charitable efforts are designed to help people who were injured in the shootings and their families, as well as the friends and relatives of people who died. Some of the money is also being used to improve campus security throughout the state and to memorialize those who were killed.

The university' s new Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund — created the day after the shootings to pay for grief counseling, memorials, and other needs of victims' families and survivors — has raised more than $1-million, including an estimated 8,000 online donations totaling about $800,000, said Michael Kiser, the university's director of development communication.

"We have shifted from a fund-raising operation to a gift-processing operation," he said. "The volume has been incredible."

Mr. Kiser said that university officials hope the fund will raise enough to go beyond meeting immediate needs and produce enough money to pay for a $100,000 fully endowed scholarship named in honor of each one of the 32 students and faculty members killed by the Virginia Tech senior who ended the killing spree by taking his own life.

Several other charitable funds have been started, some by people with ties to Virginia Tech.

For example, the United Way of Montgomery, Radford & Floyd, in Christiansburg, announced a fund to assist victims of the tragedy with funeral expenses, mental-health services, and other needs. Its "United in Caring Fund,"created with a $10,000 gift from Michael Vick, an Atlanta Falcons quarterback who played football at Virginia Tech, has now generated close to $170,000. Officials said they are now preparing to distribute the first round of grants, up to $1,000 for families of each victim or survivor; the money will help them pay for unexpected out-of-pocket expenses such as travel, child care, or high telephone bills.

Three Virginia community foundations also created new funds. At the Community Foundation of New River Valley, also in Christiansburg, three siblings who graduated from Virginia Tech have established the 4-17 Fund with a $10,000 donation that has been matched dollar-for-dollar by their parents. The fund is named for the day after the attack, as a way to symbolize the family's desire to help the campus move forward.

The fund, which has already received one gift of $1,000 from an outside donor, is earmarked for activities that bring residents of the Christiansburg area together to help one another.

At the Foundation for the Roanoke Valley, an anonymous donor gave $1,000 to set up a School Violence Assistance Fund to aid victims of the shootings and similar events. The foundation will cover administrative expenses so that 100 percent of contributions to its fund will be used for charitable purposes. The fund has received $22,000 from individuals and groups such as a local schools that have held fund-raising events.

And at the Community Foundation Serving Richmond and Central Virginia, officials said that they have not yet tallied the total of more than a dozen gifts made to its VT Remembrance Fund for Student Safety, which aims to assist Virginia Tech in the short term and other Virginia campuses on longer-term projects to improve security.

Bobby Thalhimer, senior vice president of advancement at the Richmond community foundation, said that before setting up the fund, his group's chief executive called her counterpart at the Oklahoma City Community Foundation to ask for advice. That organization coordinated grant making after the 1995 bombing of a federal building in that city that killed 168 people.

Nancy B. Anthony, head of the Oklahoma fund, "said to make the fund's purpose broad, because you do not know the needs that will unfold over time," Mr. Thalhimer said. "And she stressed the need to have broad and trusted community leadership beyond our own board allocate money from the fund."

Other charities have decided to take a hands-off approach in setting up memorial funds, preferring to let the people of Virginia Tech determine how to allocate any money they raise. That is the case with the Korean American Coalition, a national organization that has joined several other Korean-American groupns including the Korean American Students Conference and the Southern California Korean College Student Association to create the Virginia Tech Memorial Fund, which has raised a few thousand dollars so far.

"The people who can make the best decision on how any donation regarding this tragedy should be handled are the people who were affected," said Gie Kim, vice chair of the Korean American Coalition's national board. "We will work closely with the president of Virginia Tech and the administration so they can decide how to handle any donations made by our organizations."