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A Message from the Vice President of University Advancement 

No current human project strikes me as more visionary and hope-filled than the . It’s an international repository holding well more than one million seed samples from all over the world with room for millions more. The goal is to preserve and protect crop diversity in the face of genetic developments in human food sources, climate change, war, and other challenges.

The Global Seed Vault is rooted in the , but its expansion and improvement can be credited to an international effort involving United Nations and other transnational agencies, as well as individual nations. Full credit goes to the Norwegian government, which funded its original construction.

Contemporary media mostly draws our attention to the problems that might one day lead to us needing to tap the resources of the Seed Vault. (The Syrian civil war of the mid-2010s already led to one such deployment with great benefit.)

I want to focus on the hope behind this project. The Seed Vault’s creators and stewards see international cooperation in our present and our future. They see the challenges we face as individual nations and as a human family, but they also take very practical steps that will be the grounds for solving problems and mitigating their effects.

When students arrive at Loyola to study and when you stay involved by volunteering for and investing in Loyola, they and you show a similar practical-minded faith in what education achieves. Combining intellectual and technical excellence with a community grounded in virtue and care for one another is powerful.

Thank you for seeing the future before others do—for unleashing your generosity like the waters that irrigate farmers’ fields.

(By the way, PBS NewsHour did a few months ago. If you have less than 10 minutes, you might find it worth a watch.)

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Chris Wiseman '88