With its new #1Gift1Vote fundraising initiative, the University is now bringing student voices — and student donations — into the fold.

Unrolled on March 13, the campaign, made possible through a $10,000 donation from Provost Lisa Lynch, allows students who make a minimum $5 donation to the University to vote for how the $10,000 is apportioned around campus.

Students who donate can vote to give money to six categories: ’DEIS Impact, general scholarships, the Intercultural Center, the Green Fund, Brandeis Libraries and the Waltham Group. The $10,000 will then be divided based on the number of votes each category receives.

“On behalf of the University, I want to thank Provost Lisa Lynch for her generous gift to Brandeis,” Nancy Winship, senior vice president of institutional advancement, said in an emailed statement to the Justice. “Not only will her gift directly benefit Brandeis, but the #1Gift1Vote Challenge will help educate our students about the significance of donor support in the continued success of the University.”

The campaign was announced last Monday in an email to students, and the Annual Giving staff is already working hard to spread the word across campus.

Ben Niles, the assistant director of Annual Giving, said in an interview with the Justice that he approached the project with the hope of “trying to spread that feeling of giving back to the place you spent your four years of college.”

“Brandeis is itself a worthy cause,” he said. “I think a lot of students have the causes that they want to support while they’re students and when they become alumni, and I think often people sort of forget that their college is what allowed them to pursue those philanthropic causes.”

While the University’s donor outreach is typically focused on alumni and graduating seniors, the emphasis is transitioning more toward “every gift counts” with this new initiative.

“We see all the names on the buildings and think that that’s the only philanthropy that really matters, but our office is very, very dedicated and focused to every gift mattering, no matter the size,” Aaron Louison ’11 MA ’16, the interim director of Annual Giving, said in the interview.

Over the course of the year, he said, the University relies on smaller-sized gifts from a broader base of constituents when it comes to providing scholarships and operating support programs on campus.

With this initiative, the University is also trying to get students involved in a tradition of giving back to the community early on, Louison explained.

“In order to give back, one needs to be educated as to why it’s important, and really get into the habit early,” he said. “So starting programs like this gives students — freshman through seniors — the opportunity to give and support the causes at Brandeis that they care about.”

As Louison and Niles explained, this campaign allows students to support areas of campus that matter to them and that directly affect them. “We know that Brandeisians are some of the most community service-oriented people out there … It means that this campus is very engaged in supporting communities, whatever that community may be. But the most immediate community is sometimes the one that gets forgotten,” Louison said.

But while the #1Gift1Vote campaign brings some new ideas to the table, the central theme of giving back is nothing new, Louison said, adding that Brandeis was built on a tradition of donations.

In recent years, he said, former University President Frederick Lawrence had a similar challenge — that he would give $10,000 to the University if the graduating class of seniors could set a new class donation record.

The giving trend is one that Louison said he hopes will continue, especially as the Brandeis alumni base grows every year.

“The next few decades are going to be so important for what Brandeis can accomplish,” he said, “and we can’t rely on the same donors that we relied on 50 years ago, and there’s no way we should rely on tuition, because once you start relying on tuition, you can’t accept the best students like we always have. So private support is just going to become more important.”

In the end, though, community ties reign supreme, Louison said. “You’re really a Brandeisian for life.”