Recognizing the significant contributions CSU graduates make to California and beyond, CSU Trustee Wenda Fong and her husband Daniel Fetterly have given a $125,000 endowment benefiting the CSU Trustees’ Award for Outstanding Achievement, creating a lasting legacy of supporting student success.
The
CSU Trustees’ Award for Outstanding Achievement—the highest student distinction within the university system—grants students scholarships based on academic achievement, financial need, excellence in community service and personal hardship. Since the program’s inception in 1984, more than 500 students have been honored with the award.
Through the award program, each of the 23 awardees receive their funds through a named scholarship. Since joining the Board of Trustees in 2018, Fong and Fetterly have donated annually toward the CSU Trustees’ Award, with one student named each year as the CSU Trustee Wenda Fong and Daniel Fetterly Scholar.
In addition to Fong and Fetterly’s $125,000 endowment, the CSU Foundation contributed $50,000 as part of an incentive program to fully endow the scholarship. The $175,000 endowment will generate a $7,000 scholarship each year, ensuring that the CSU Trustee Wenda Fong and Daniel Fetterly scholarship fund is awarded in perpetuity.
“The diverse and talented students the CSU educates and propels into meaningful careers not only strengthen California’s highly educated workforce, they use their CSU education to transform and uplift their communities in a myriad of ways,” Fong says. “So, supporting the CSU, its mission and its remarkable students helps ensure that California and, ultimately, the nation continue to thrive.”
Beyond Financial Support
In addition to providing financial support to Trustees' Awards recipients, Fong takes a hands-on approach to encouraging the students. Following the annual awards ceremony in September, Fong shares her contact information with them and makes an intentional effort to engage with them regularly. She offers guidance and mentorship and connects the students with people in her network that can open doors for them.
She has developed relationships with several of the awardees of her scholarship, including Cal Poly San Luis Obispo graduate
Christine Lam. The two met in 2021 when Lam—who was pursuing a master’s degree in public policy—was selected to receive a CSU Trustees’ Award, and Fong became a mentor to Lam.
CSU Trustee Wenda Fong with mentee, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo alumna Christine Lam at her 2022 graduation ceremony.
Over the course of the last three years, Fong has remained close with Lam and given her valuable professional and personal advice. Lam is now a senior associate in the infrastructure advisory department at the audit, tax and advisory firm KPMG, and she gives back to the CSU by volunteering for Back to College Night, for example, an annual advocacy event held in Sacramento.
Fong says it is important to her that the people she mentors share her commitment to lifting up those who come after them.
“I hope that, by being given the opportunity to persist, to pursue their dreams and to succeed, the recipients of this scholarship will be inspired to continue on and reach greater heights, but I also hope that it doesn't end with them,” Fong says. “I hope they continue to pay it forward in giving back in their own way; that they realize it is their responsibility to, in turn, help others.”
A Legacy of Altruism
Fong attributes her passion for philanthropy and higher education to the example her parents and grandparents set for her, the latter of whom immigrated to the United States “so that their children would never have to lift anything heavier than a pencil,” she says.
“It stems from my family's values of giving back and knowing how higher education afforded the lives that we and my family, my siblings, my nieces and nephews, are so blessed to have,” Fong continues. “I have stood on the shoulders of my grandparents and parents, and I want others to stand on my shoulders.”
She devoted much of her
50-year career in the entertainment industry to raising representation and visibility of Asian Pacific Islander Desi Americans, and to improving the public perception of the APIDA community. She co-founded Asian Americans for Fair Media to help combat negative depictions of APIDA individuals in entertainment and founded a support network called the Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment (CAPE)—the largest, longest-running and one of the most influential organizations for APIDA individuals in the entertainment industry.
Similarly, Fetterly has demonstrated a commitment to giving back, having served the country for more than 24 years as a Green Beret in the U.S. Army Special Forces and as a Special Operations Instructor at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center. He successfully completed multiple tours of duty around the world and throughout the U.S. including Operation Iraqi Freedom in Iraq and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.
Fetterly currently volunteers with the U.S. Air Force Junior ROTC and the U.S. Army Junior ROTC programs, and he is a Life Member of the Special Forces Association and the American Legion.
Coincidentally, Fetterly’s connection with the CSU was formed long ago when he completed basic training in 1970 at Fort Ord, which is now Cal State Monterey Bay.
In 2018, Fong was appointed by then-Governor Jerry Brown to the CSU Board of Trustees and began serving as chair of the board in 2022, becoming the first Asian American to hold that position at the CSU. In this role, Fong has tirelessly championed the university and helped to advance the CSU as a national leader in inclusive excellence and accomplishment.
She has worked with such luminaries as seven presidents, a pope, Beyoncé, Michael Jackson and even Elvis Presley, “but being a CSU trustee, and particularly chair of the board, has been the greatest honor and privilege of my life,” she says.
The CSU Foundation is working toward fully endowing the entire Trustees’ Awards program so that California’s students are supported for generations to come.
Learn more about giving to the CSU.